Don’t miss out, you’ll regret it when these things are selling for $4mil a pop.
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Don’t miss out, you’ll regret it when these things are selling for $4mil a pop.
I’m half considering trying to refresh the page…
I’ll let you know.
I have refreshed but nothing
Metadata has no reference. Also set an auto-clicker to go off 600 times and nothing.
Well i used an auto refresher for half an hour and nothing
You probably went over 600 and missed it.
The asterisk says “not even a little bit unique”.
So this is either the punchline about today’s comic about games and consoles that I lack the context for, or setup for something upcoming upcoming.
Some context for you
https://www.gameinformer.com/2021/12/22/ubisoft-doubles-down-on-nfts-calls-them-a-major-change-that-will-take-time
Completely missed this news. Thanks for the link.
Oh wow, that’s hilarious!
That decision totally won’t backfire on them. Nope. Definitely not.
Ha ha!
Ubisoft can be such idiots. ¬¬
By the way, thanks for the link.
It is sadly the way all large platforms are leaning. They see revenue streams and the opportunity to fleece the victim…err…. player/subscriber.
The only way to address this is to boycott any of their products. And do the same for every other company doing rubbish things to employees and consumers.
Support indie games. Encourage them not to sell out to bigger studios so their games can be sodomized by their new owners.
You’re completely missing the point of NFTs here. If you were to make an in-game purchase of a (likely but not necessarily) cosmetic item, like a custom skin for a gun, for example, you pay the game maker, you get your item, and that’s that. Now, the game maker may or may not provide you with a marketplace with which you can sell that asset, but if they do, they control that marketplace. They can make whatever rules they want – maybe you can only trade it for in game currency, or maybe they want a cut of every sale,… Read more »
That would be mildly interresting if most implementations weren’t actually doing their darndest to sabotage those very benefits and retain or take total control of the marketplace.
Meanwhile, if they wanted to do the right thing, nothing is stopping them from just doing so, with simpler traditional tech.
The games industry is just too big and competitive now for anyone to survive by focusing on making games fun and entertaining, so until it implodes expect more and more player-controlling schemes that stray ever further from having anything to do with actually playing and enjoying games for entertainment’s sake.
You’re right that it could easily be “nerfed” such that you don’t actually control the wallet that holds the NFT. If they abstract that away in their interface, then the point of using NFTs for this purpose is fairly useless, except to perhaps prove that only a certain number of that item exists in the world. Which of course, could be changed if they have the capability to mint more of them. It is up to the game studios themselves to implement NFTs in a way that makes sense, and brings the benefits of the technology to the masses. If… Read more »
This calls for a script….
While I love the blow back companies dipping their toes into the NFT market are getting (Stalker devs nearly lost their face, nobody is buying Ubisoft’s NFTs) I fear that the Ubisoft CEO(?) may be right. That devs and publishers are just going to keep pushing this and pushing this and people will eventually just “accept” it.
After all, remember Horse Armor?
Why do people need to accept this? Epic, GoG, Steam and others have many great old school games. And the reality is, some of them are only less good in graphic levels… the gameplay can be just as good.
Sink these companies. Do it enough time and the culture in the sector will change.
But that takes resolution.
The fact that you’re talking about the Epic store in the same breath as GoG and Steam, after all the exclusivity deals they tried to foist onto the PC market (among all the other strong arm shenanigans) is indicative of the above (M37j3w3) guy’s point. Even if said strongarm tactics are necessary to gain a foothold and remove Steam’s stranglehold on electronic download purchases, not to mention how competition can be good (it did much to “ease” Steam’s cut of the revenue stream for indies), that the Epic Store is now “part of the gang” after how it shook up… Read more »
I’ll be honest, I have an Epic account, but I’ve only got the free games they gave away. I’ve bought a few things from GoG. 90%+ of my buying has been on Steam. I think when they came out, I realized what you are saying and bascially never bought anything from them. If they want to give me free games, I’m okay with that. And yes, I know we as a community of gamers don’t have much memory or at least we give in relatively early to get the next new game. Steam, like Netflix, when it started had the… Read more »
Epic will do anything to tie you into their platform, which is exactly why I have ignored them entirely, even refusing to take advantage of the free games they offer. It’s just bait, and I’d rather pay money for a good game though a platform I use because it’s a good platform. For that matter I’m done entirely with all forms of exclusive distribution. You can produce the content I purchase or sell/stream/distribute content with equal access by all consumers and producers. If you use one to push the other, that’s a shitty compromise that doesn’t interest me and I’ll… Read more »
That horse has been beaten to dust already with little reason. It was only a matter of time before major game makers started taking notes from smaller companies who got their ideas from trading cards, toy vending machines and arcade machines. It all blew up around the same time, this test was only one of the first of many to come. In 1990 there was a Japanese arcade game you could buy upgrades by adding more coins to the machine (double dragon 3). In 1997 a text based MUD called Archaea by Iron Realms Entertainment (American) brought in game premium… Read more »
The model isn’t just for games. The platforms have mutated from something reasonable at their inception (a mail system that was better than what was there before and free, a dating/social network to help people connect, and a computer company focused on making amazing products). Their mutated version today is more like 3 platforms all about lock in, billing you for stuff, and collecting your metadata.
Obviously there are factors driving such common results and those are money, money, and mo’ money! Plus the ‘we don’t give a crap if we’re evil now’.
Achaea was not the first. Avalon beat them to it.
Could we for once reject a new predatory monetization model, before it gains any traction?
Ubisoft is getting none of my money going forward. So there’s that.
First of all, no. As soon as a drool-worthy title comes out using NFTs, it will set a new standard and there’s nothing you can do about it. And this is coming from someone who used to consider themself a gamer, until multiplayer online, subscription models, FTP, and building AIs to cheat instead of be smarter at playing the game took over the industry. Second, there are benefits to using NFTs that you are completely missing in your efforts to brand this “predatory”. There’s nothing about NFT technology that is inherently predatory; it is the way these companies decide to… Read more »
NFT’s? Yeah, enjoy the tulips…
Oh how I wish tulips were the only go to example. It’s baffling just how much people refuse to learn the most glaring lessons of history.
Which ones? That you can get lots of money if you find ways to scalp your player base? Or that gamer memory is ephemeral and short lived?
More that trendy investments are a bubble that will eventually burst so it is best to avoid them. You keep hearing about the trending investments as something you “can’t lose money buying” which draws in people blinded by the promise of easy money until the market hits the saturation point and prices crash.
That is what the tulip comment was about but there are many other bubble economies that popped like the 90s comic book crash or the real-estate crash of 2008.
Just a point: In my area, people have been saying for 30 years that housing is in a bubble and will correct one day. Hasn’t. Has sometimes cooled, maybe even stalled for a few months, but then rolled along far faster than inflation. It has never declined in all that time. It’s hard to see NFTs NOT being trendy, but it remains to be seen if it will actually crash. It lacks the pragmatism of owning land and a roof and walls, but I’d never have imagined people wanting to have a cellular phone capability they could get for about… Read more »
Housing is something that may crash, but isn’t destined to, because a house always has practical value. People will always need houses. Most other things, though, have worth because we humans all collectively think it’s worth something – be it NFTs, Crypto, paper money, gold, baseball cards, or beanie babies. The trendier “investments” are the ones that are just high because everyone thinks that they’re high, and everyone is buying because they expect the value to increase, and so it does. If there’s nothing holding it up other than “This keeps rising because everyone expects it to keep rising and… Read more »
While it seems you’re suggesting that the vast majority of NFTs aren’t inherently valuable – and if so, I completely agree! I think that people need to separate existing uses of NFTs and the NFT technology itself when they make a value judgment here. I personally believe that there are no NFTs worth owning right now (unless money is no object to you), but I think the technology itself has great potential to be absolutely useful and change the world, not just the gaming industry. Companies that are doing things with NFTs are really just in the experimental phase at… Read more »
The fine print is fucked up with distortions on my mobile, very hard to read. I’ve read it eventually
“Unique” being just the brand name, of course xD
What’s going to be sad is it’s eventually going to be the norm at some point. It’s like DLC. At first when it came out, gamers were incensed. Then over time they kept pushing, gamers kept giving till like today, it’s the norm. At a certain point, they’re going to go games as a service through something like that recent Google games service. The only thing that kept it from being a success was the infrastructure just doesn’t exist to match what you can do locally. At some point, someone is going to develop or release some form of internet… Read more »
Comparing DLC to NFTs is incredibly stupid. DLC was never a bad thing, it was the way the companies were doing it that was (and sometimes still is) a problem. NFTs are always going to be planet destroying pyramid schemes. There’s no way to do them correctly, nothing positive to be had. And they’re not going to become the norm, governments are already starting to regulate or outright ban them. Ubisoft and any other companies are just trying to cash in before the bubble bursts. And please, spare us all the “gaming needs another crash” rhetoric. We’ve been hearing that… Read more »
Not true at all. There are many ways in which NFTs could be a great way to enhance players gaming experience, but I agree that the current landscape is just full of pyramid schemes (No idea how you could classify them as “planet destryoing”, though). Just think of being able to use your world of warcraft character, in which you’ve put countless hours of time to level and equip, in a game like hearthstone or another mmorpg. Or transfering your weapon skins through counter strike games or similiar FPS. Could be a pretty fun experience and just got a lot… Read more »
Okay, but how would absolutely any of that work? How would you transfer a WoW character into, say, FFXIV? There aren’t proper analogues for a lot of it, and even then you’re just letting players be skipping a huge amount of content for no good reason. A level 60 Rogue in WoW is not the same as a level 60 Rogue in FFXIV. Transferring skins seems interesting, except for that…this has nothing to do with NFTs. If Activision wants to get all of its CoD skins and make them transferrable from one CoD game to another, that’s awesome! It also… Read more »
Heck, even if you’re talking about transferring the “character”‘s appearance, I CAN DO THAT TOO!
It’s called booting up FFXIV and making a character that looks JUST LIKE the WoW character.
Making a bunch of bad balance and design choices like this does nothing but inconvenience people who simply want to play a game and enjoy themselves.
I think the closest equivalent to NFTs would be the steam inventory of knives and shit for CSGO, and hats and stuff for TF2. Even then its not at all positive for the gamers themselves and its really just more beneficial for steam since they try to make sure trades are done within their own marketplace so they reap a cut at all times (as well as steam credit not being removable, so technically steam still owns all of it)
That is the “Solution before Problem” mindset, very common sight when it comes to blockchain tech. It is a flawed notion that relies on the assumption that because the solution (e.g. NFT) exists then surely stuff (like “cross-game”) will become a thing now! Not asking why it never was a thing beforehand (The problem). The reason we don’t do “cross-game” is not cause we lacked a cross-game database, but because it just doesn’t make sense to implement it from the p.o.v. of a publisher or developer. You want your game to stand on its own and most importantly want work… Read more »
“Just think of being able to use your world of warcraft character, in which you’ve put countless hours of time to level and equip, in a game like hearthstone or another mmorpg.” This is not how NFTs work and they will not allow you to do that. I’m not even talking about technical difficulties of importing a character into another game made on a different engine and using different assets. I’m talking about what NFTs mean, the digital signature of a specific digital item. “Another possibility with NFTs is to actually earn a small income from playing games without being… Read more »
Pokemon’s been doing your “Just think of being able to use your character in a different game!” bit since 1999, and haven’t needed to use NFTs. And non-pros have been making an income from playing games ever since game streaming and Lets Plays have been a thing.
None of that involves sending money to Papa Ubisoft to buy some sort of intangible imaginary token, for a thing that they completely still 100% own the rights to (that is, their data, image, likeness, etc).
You have to be a child to not remember that this started way back with bethesda and horse armor. People have been accepting things along the way, which has led us to shit life NFT.
I suggest you go back and check the history of DLC. It predates Horse Armor by quite a bit.
I definitely agree that the Horse Armor cosmetic was not a high point, but content-rich DLC is a natural progression from the expansion packs like StarCraft: Brood War.
Unlikely NFTs will be as easily adapted. Owning and trading NFTs requires using third party services, by-design they can’t be seamlessly integrated in proprietory game developer infrastructure. DLCs don’t require additional effort from a gamer, NFTs do
Before DLC it was called expansion set or pack. Beyond the Dark Portal was the expansion set to Warcraft 2. Throne Of Bhaal was the expansion for Baldurs Gate 2. It was additional software that required the original game to run. When downloading a game digitally became a common thing they moved expansion packs to serve mainly if not exclusively online.
Wasn’t sure if this was about Ubisoft or Activision until the NFT thing showed up. It’s Ubisoft. ?
I initially thought Activision, then when they said “release the same game over and over again” I thought Bethesda or Rock star. It was only when I got to the NFT I realised.
“Not even a little bit unique.”
Sounds like character skins you are allowed to sell when you get bored of using it. Which I think would actually be a better way to market it, than calling it an NFT. Because gamers buy skins for characters they like and if you are someone who buys skins you probably have skins you don’t use any longer. Even if you take a loss, it is worth it if you can recoup any of your money once you no longer want it. Also people could buy skins on the second hand market for cheaper and get a good deal. Maybe… Read more »
Hey, that would actually be a pretty good idea.
If companies did something like that, then it would probably do quite well. (If that is what they’re currently doing, then all they need is a good marketing department to stop them from saying it in the dumb way they currently are.)
It would probably do well, but it would also probably come with a ridiculous transaction fee also Roblox. Making rare skins something between gambling and an investment.
Yes, but due to inflation $4mil will only get you a cup of coffee at McDonald’s.
…Five hundred eighty five, Five hundred eighty six, Five hundred eighty sevAAAAHHH!!! Carpal tunnel!
I think my browser crashed around 300 refreshes.
Knowing a little bit of Developer Console scripting is neat
If it crashes, maybe you need a bit more console scripting…. 😉
I kid. There’s always more to learn. Keep at it.
Yes…okay…you got me for like…5 full on seconds. I can’t even lie. That’s REALLY funny
NFT’s are still just going to end up like the trading cards that they really are.
its just another name for the same thing.
your still going to have to find idiots to over pay for what is essentially a digital photo/file/skin etc.
Reminds me of the guy that created a web page whose only content was a 1 million pixel image. Each pixel could be purchased for $1. The agreement was the site would be hosted for at least 10 years. You could put whatever you wanted if you bought enough pixels.
The guy sold out the $1 million because he did this first. The cost was low enough it could be chump change and not noticeable.
It had the same ‘no clear long time survial’ aspect as NFTs.
and honestly a better business model. you could buy the pixels to make whatever you wanted. hell guy only needs to make a few domains and repeat to make profit. and he even has a failsafe with the hosting limit being known.
Others tried, but it was the uniqueness of it that got the big score. Sort of like that app-store jewel graphic that was being sold for stupid amounts of money and some people were still buying it…. because that made them part of an exclusive circle of sorts. (My urge to name that ‘the P.T. Barnum fan club’ is high, but I don’t have that kind of money to spend stupidly so maybe I’d be that dumb if I had oodles of $$$…. the rich sometimes seem to be a bit that way….)
Anyone else getting a thing where the background behind the comic is overlaying everything else, and the contents is below it?
We gotta see something about scalpers being like black market warlords buying off too many soldiers like mercs or something,
We already have, soldiers were in jail cells and their captors were wearing rags over their faces.
Next you will be able to place bets on your Success in missions during games.
I don’t mind micro-transactions when they are just cosmetics, they feel like a donation to a game you like. However, there’s a limit when they are designed to be addicting, break in-game aesthetics (for MMORPGs), entice gambling and/or involve in game scam-currencies designed to both cause you to lose track of real costs and force you to overpay so you’ll have money leftover that you’ll then want to spend requiring even more currency purchases. I don’t understand how games are actually combining all of that, along with pay to win micro-transactions, and people actually play those games! How much is… Read more »
ive been out of the loop on the big idiots, what crap are they pulling now?
The new “innovation” that corporate stooges are whipping themselves into a frenzy over is Non-Fungible Tokens, where you can pay to have your name attached via hack-able database to a digital asset that is easily copied for free (that is to funge them). Database owners could always kick you to the curb for any (non-)reason; but if you can pawn the asset to some other sucker before that or the whole thing collapses, it’s not your loss!
Even as a joke, this fills me with rage.
So Tim, how does it feel to accidentally give yourself a DDoS attack from all the refreshing?
Didn’t work
Man, where’s that cryptofan person to tell us these are all going to the moon and replacing other forms of art and commerce?
I was on holidays. But that’s not what I’m here to say. I think that the vast, VAST majority of existing NFTs are worthless garbage. But the technology behind them can be incredibly useful both inside and outside the gaming industry, and we’re a long way away from getting there. “Innovating” by selling NFTs as art is just an experimental phase where yes, suckers are wasting their money, but this experimental phase will eventually lead us to a place where NFTs have benefits and use cases. I won’t get into that now because I want to keep this comment short.… Read more »
Didn’t Auran Games (now N3V) have this idea for the Trainz franchise originally? A model railway game with a collecting aspect: some models would be limited edition or otherwise rare. They had an ID system for tracking everything.
In the end they abandoned the idea before the first release. That was 20 years ago.
Yes cause NFT are so secure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzpyhZHDPys&t=746s
I wonder if the next comic is going to talk about how Xbox bought the rights to crash bandicoot and Spyro
Guys I think hit refresh it 600 times it’s just a joke and you actually have to pay the money for the panel
there should add the atari vcs
They should be a page where they find the skeleton of a game and watch