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Gaming NFTs for the Masses

by | Mar 30, 2023 | Show Notes | 0 comments

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The big game companies – Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Epic Games – are all insinuating they are taking a close look at NFTs or moving forward and bringing them into their ecosystem, signaling mass adoption. We explore how these companies can bring NFTs to the masses.

Sony filed a patent for transferrable NFTs that can be applied to multiple game titles and consoles, which signals their intention to implement the technology.

Digital ownership asset transfer empowers players to monetize their game play and in-game asset accruals, which is a HUGE billion dollar industry already. Let’s chat digital asset ownership in relation to gaming in this Episode #206 of The Nifty Show.

This is a follow on discussion to last week’s Episode #205 covering the Sony NFT patent news, which you can catch here: https://nifty.show/205

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FULL SHOW TRANSCRIPT AND TIME STAMPS

00:00:00
Ryles: The Nifty show. The apparent inevitability of NFT mass adoption is becoming higher resolution and drawing nearer amid recent news. I’m Ryles hosting the nifty show with Joel Comm. Pleased to bring you episode number 206, if you can believe that.

00:00:19
Joel Comm: And this is kind of this episode dovetails off of our last episode. We in 205 talked about how the big game companies, the Giants, Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Epic Games, all either insinuating that they’re taking a close look at Nfts or in some cases are actually moving forward and bringing them into their ecosystem. And today, we’re going to talk about how these companies and perhaps others can help bring nfts to the masses via gaming.

00:00:56
Ryles: One of the biggest stories that broke in our last episode was that PlayStation, Sony, the the owners of PlayStation have filed a patent for Transferable Nfts that that can be applied to multiple games, multiple consoles, multiple hardware devices. And this this was pretty huge news on the grounds that Sony is a massive, massive player in the gaming space. And if they are to put Nfts onto a PlayStation. Immediately that technology is going to become exposed to millions of people that have never heard of Nfts.

00:01:37
Joel Comm: Right. They’re not just saying, hey, we’re thinking about this. They’re saying we’re we’re we’ve got a patent. We intend to do this. This is happening. So keep up.

00:01:48
Ryles: Of course, since this is games that we’re talking about, there is already been a lot of discourse, even in the gaming mainstream pertaining to nfts and amid entities like bored apes, Dookie and some of the play to earn projects that have spectacularly crashed and and even ruin some people’s lives. You can imagine that the coverage hasn’t been overall positive, but with both of these things happening at the same time, there’s a lot to to expect in the near future.

00:02:27
Joel Comm: You know, before before you go on to that, I’m wondering, I could think of two major arguments that the new the well has been poisoned with as far as gamers are concerned. You know, one of them being that nfts are a Ponzi scheme. Actually, three nfts are a Ponzi scheme. And if I can own your NFT by right click, save assing it. Now I own your jpeg of your ape or whatever. And the third is that nfts kill the environment because of gas fees on what used to be proof of work on Ethereum and is now proof of stake. Are there others I’m missing?

00:03:12
Ryles: It seems to me that the primary association that the the gaming mainstream has with NFTS is that they’re just a scam, like they’re just designs to take money from you and not actually give you what they promise in return.

00:03:25
Joel Comm: And imagine that the the lack of understanding that you must have, you’ll go in a game and you’ll pay real money to own a skin or a weapon or, you know, that you use only in the game versus being able to purchase something, purchase something with real money and be able to sell it to somebody else. That is maybe not even in game yet. I don’t get it.

00:03:56
Ryles: This is actually there’s another story that that wasn’t previously in the show notes that we should discuss, because this this brings to mind the fact that EA just announced that they are taking service offline for several games and because they’re taking the services offline, they are no longer selling them. And these are games that existed before the concept of games as a service. Battlefield Bad Company one Battlefield, Bad Company two and Mirror’s Edge all have online functionality that is just going to disappear. Those were those were products that people paid once for to own them. And now functionality is being taken away because there’s no system in place to guarantee that you own anything. So rip the Band-Aid off everything that you have ever bought in gaming. If it requires any kind of server or you don’t have physical media for it, you don’t own it. And some of these companies, including ourselves, are trying to help remedy that.

00:04:50
Joel Comm: So that that’s real interesting. I’m looking that story up right now and I’m going to go ahead and and put that on the screen because I think that it really is the the tale being told there that people have paid to license these games. And now Electronic Arts, EA is saying, well, we’re taking them off the stores. So the money that you put in to pay these games, you don’t have access to the functionality that you you paid for before.

00:05:24
Ryles: And let’s be very specific about this. The single player functions should still be available. It’s basically all online functionality that is going away, which.

00:05:34
Joel Comm: Is for these games. That’s a big deal for some of.

00:05:36
Ryles: Them, Yes, Not so much for Mirror’s Edge. I think that only has like Speedrunning leaderboards, but for the shooters, the entire reason to play them was really the online. It wasn’t the campaigns.

00:05:48
Joel Comm: It does show how much power that the companies have to to be able to control what people are going to play.

00:05:59
Ryles: Anyway, that was really just a valuable detail to add context to the situation. At the end of the day, what we’re looking at right now is we’re looking at companies, very large companies that are putting effort into delivering NFT services and NFT value to gamers, and a lot of gamers are not going to be happy with that. But I’m very certain about some things that are going to happen anyway. Okay.

00:06:24
Joel Comm: What are those things?

00:06:26
Ryles: Mike His assertion is that Nfts are going to become extremely commonplace and extremely standard in games in the mainstream, regardless of who likes it or not, no matter what. And here’s why. Okay. There’s there’s multiple reasons. The first one and no one’s going to like hearing this, but this is just a factual statement. Historically, new technologies get mass adopted by the gaming mainstream against the wishes of the vocal minority. So, you know, when I was growing up, the standard was you purchase one game on the physical medium, typically a compact disc. You would own that game, you would play that game whenever you pop the disc into to your PC. And that was the end of it. But beginning with first downloadable content, which I think pretty much everybody is still in favor of where you would pay a larger sum for a sizable chunk of content to be added to a game that you all really enjoy that turned into microtransactions where we have seen a lot of good and we’ve seen a lot of that and the whole reputation of microtransactions got off on the wrong foot and has kind of stayed there in a lot of ways. Infamously, the the Oblivion Horse Armor is sort of the first controversial DLC that I would contend would be better categorized as a microtransaction where Bethesda attempted to sell a a horse armor for the Elder Scrolls for oblivion. Um.

00:08:03
Joel Comm: Which was a very popular game, right?

00:08:06
Ryles: Yes. Oblivion is a very well received game. And this is really a pattern with Bethesda. Bethesda produces very popular games that have some very weird quirks about them. Anyway, they were widely made fun of for the horse armor, and I’m going to guess they didn’t get a ton of sales out of that. But if you look at the current state of things, if you look at how prolific and universal microtransactions have become, I’m not saying that they’re all a good thing. I’m just saying that they’re all they’re more examples of these technologies that have gotten mass adopted. Are the concept of games as a service, which everybody should now be very intimately familiar with. That’s the concept that it’s no longer games as a product. It’s a an always online service that is provided for the duration that the company is willing to maintain the servers. And at this point, I have watched one hundreds of games as a service games die forever because they lost support.

00:09:08
Joel Comm: And then, well, there’s all kinds of problems because you linked up an article here that that actually lists eight problems with this games as a service model. What are the absolute ones?

00:09:20
Ryles: So I love the first one in this article because it lists that they sort of use games as a service. Developers will use games as a service to excuse releasing something that isn’t finished because there is this implicit promise that things will be fixed along the way. They’ll be patched in future updates and cut content that they couldn’t release in time will come out at a later date. And maybe these promises get fulfilled and maybe they don’t. And a lot of these problems are very real. But again, I’m not talking about whether they’re good or bad. I’m just saying these are now widely adopted. I have a question.

00:10:01
Joel Comm: This is this example in this photo. This is not intended to look like a man in a skeleton costume. Right. This is this is a skeleton that somehow the texturing isn’t done yet and they’ve still got the outfit on him.

00:10:17
Ryles: I mean, that sure looks like a I couldn’t tell you. I don’t know what game that’s from. I mean, I can tell you it makes a lot of things like that. A lot of game things like this have definitely happened for sure.

00:10:27
Joel Comm: Makes the case for, you know, putting out something before it’s ready.

00:10:31
Ryles: Yeah, absolutely. And again, like these, these are definitely real problems. So what you would be taking away from this in the context of what I asserted is that even if some bad things happen as a result of Nfts becoming integrated into the gaming mainstream, it’s going to happen, period. This is just historical evidence for why that’s going to be the case.

00:10:56
Joel Comm: Well, and I see this in a broader sense, too, because I remember, you know, getting online early and when the Web was new, people saying, oh, this Internet thing will never catch on. I remember when Jeff Bezos started selling books out of his garage and they were like, Oh, people will never shop online. When the smartphones came out, people say, We don’t need a smartphone. We don’t need a computer in our pockets. We just want to be able to make calls. And so, of course, the new technology at the beginning, people push against it. You can go back to when, you know, Henry Ford made the automobile and people were like, we don’t need this car. We have horse and buggies to take us around. So people are just resistant to change. They like what they know. They like what’s comfortable, and they don’t understand how these advances in technology are actually going to improve their lives and their experiences. And the same thing is going to happen with Nfts, which will probably go back to calling digital collectibles again. And, you know, just like you like to pat yourself on the back, well, deservedly for calling, you know, how Play to Earn is a bad model. Back in 2017, when Travis and I did an episode on CryptoKitties before, you know, anybody else did a show on it, we didn’t call them Nfts. We didn’t know that terminology. We call them digital collectibles, which is something that I think people can understand and embrace a lot more than an NFT.

00:12:25
Ryles: I know you want to take it in the direction of the marketable term. I don’t think I don’t think digital collectibles is going to catch on for the mainstream. I think it’s it’s still ownership, bulls, digital ownership.

00:12:37
Joel Comm: I like some other term.

00:12:38
Ryles: Like true ownership has has so much more weight to it. But besides that you’ve got me feeling like I’m playing good cop here, of all things.

00:12:46
Joel Comm: That’s okay. Go. Go for it.

00:12:48
Ryles: I sympathize with the people that are cynical about all of this. If you were an outsider looking into this space and seeing people’s lives fall apart because they bought into a scam or they bought into a play to earn that crashed or they bought into a bitcoin and their finances fell apart, wouldn’t.

00:13:10
Joel Comm: That’s kind of kind of like having your money at Silicon Valley Bank. Hello.

00:13:16
Ryles: Perspective is everything. You know, people don’t have quite the whole holistic perspective that we have on the relationship between assets and ownership and how much people have of either one. But if you were an outsider, wouldn’t you be looking at this and saying, gee, it doesn’t seem like a whole lot of people’s lives are being made better?

00:13:37
S3: Uh.

00:13:38
Joel Comm: Possibly. But if I had a very limited view, which is what we’re talking about, perhaps. See, I rarely have that view when it comes to technology, because I’m usually looking at these things before, you know, we’re anywhere near the mainstream being able to hear about it. So when I hear of new technology, I’m always just excited like, Oh, what cool toy is this? And what’s it going to do? But I can’t understand normies feeling that way.

00:14:04
S4: Normies? Yeah.

00:14:08
Ryles: Right. Yeah, it does make sense. It makes sense that people are cynical and it’s okay that they’re cynical. This is just all about how, regardless of how much reading happens, regardless of how many popular YouTubers replace the the acronym for NFT with no fucking thanks. It’s going to happen. It’s been proven that it’s going to happen. It’s proven that this isn’t a fad on the grounds that whereas Pogs didn’t have any hidden greater utility, this technology clearly does well.

00:14:45
Joel Comm: And there’s expectations too that are being put on nfts that there weren’t on previous collectibles. You know, when when we put up blockchain heroes, we said, these are these are digital collectibles. That’s what these are. That’s what they do. You open a pack, you might get something super rare. You collect them, you might be able to participate in some burn activities to get some new stuff. But that’s what they do. And now in the NFT world, that’s not enough for a lot of people. They are demanding that these collectibles, these nfts do something. It’s like the meme with the guy with the stick poking saying, Come on, NFT, do something on baseball card. I want I don’t just want a baseball card, rookie card of the new player for the Kansas City Royals. I want this card to unlock something else. I don’t think the baseball card collecting community is doing that, but it would not surprise me and I would applaud Topps or Fleer or any the companies that put out cards if they did add additional utility to their physical collectibles.

00:15:48
Ryles: People are expecting, Oh, I’m going to put money into this project, and then all the responsibility is on the the project developers for making the things that I bought worth more so that I can sell them and and make a successful trade. And that’s just none of that is going to fly anymore. That that is all over.

00:16:10
Joel Comm: And that that doesn’t mean we’re not going to see another bull market for Nfts. It just means that this get rich quick concept that that doesn’t last anywhere anyhow.

00:16:24
Ryles: You know, when we were talking about grit in the last episode, I actually had some some big hopes for it because I sort of realized everybody’s been trying to push multiple separate benefits with Nfts simultaneously. There’s the true ownership there and then there is the making money. And those are two different things because. Having provable ownership of a game asset that’s cool on its own. If that can never be taken away from you and it has utility already. That’s really slick. Okay. But then the AI, as soon as you introduce the concept of then selling digital assets, some part of it sort of inevitably becomes about this money making opportunity and some people who consume that product will either do so. Specifically because they want to make money off of it, or they may feel a little disgruntled by the fact that now there is there is a profit incentive baked into the system.

00:17:32
Joel Comm: Well, this is an ongoing discussion that we’re having because it is developing. Always developing is new initiatives or surfacing and the the marketplace is moving forward. We’d love to hear from you guys. Our email is always open 24 over seven, the nifty show at gmail.com. You could always let us know what you think of what we’re talking about. If there’s anything that you’d like us to cover. But we’re going to keep bringing you these discussions right on the front lines of Nfts now covering them since 2017. And this show is actually coming up on its third year, I believe. I don’t know when episode one officially came out. I’m trying to look it up right now and see if there’s a date on it May 30th, 2020 was the the first episode that Travis and I released. So we’re coming up on three years of of Nifty show. What do you think of that?

00:18:30
Ryles: That is a little crazy. You’re going to have to sign the show up for pre K soon.

00:18:35
Joel Comm: There you go. And don’t forget to subscribe Ring the Bells review and what else?

00:18:43
Ryles: Be sure and keep it nifty.

00:18:45
S5: Looking into the future. What do we see? It’s lined with digital collectibles. We call them NFT games, trading cards, digital art and those CryptoKitties.

00:18:59
UU: Joe Riles are the host till no trolling. I’ll say this won’t blow. They locked and loaded, so. Ready, set, go. It’s the nifty. Really kind of spiffy. The. Nifty show.

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