‘NFTs are a scam’, says indie game marketplace itch.io
Says it all, really.
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Never one to mince words, indie game storefrontitch.iohas come out strongly againstNFTsin aTwitter threadthat begins, “A few have asked about our stance on NFTs: NFTs are a scam. If you think they are legitimately useful for anything other than the exploitation of creators, financial scams, and the destruction of the planet the[n] we ask that [you] please reevaluate your life choices.”
Also f̸̗̎ú̴̩c̷̖͌ḳ̵̀ any company that says they support creators and also endorses NFTs in any way. They only care about their own profit and the opportunity for wealth above anyone else.Especially given the now easily available discourse concerning the problems of NFTs.February 6, 2022
This stands in stark contrast to the position ofUbisoft, which announced it would begin selling NFTs in games beginning with Ghost Recon: Breakpoint as part of a scheme calledUbisoft Quartz. You’ll soon be able to buy game-related NFTs fromGameStop’s new NFT marketplaceas well.
Other videogame NFT plans have been announced but then walked back with amusing haste.Team17 canceled plans for Worms NFTs, theStalker 2 NFT auctionwas quickly canceled,Discord has already given up on NFT and cryptocurrency integration, and voice actorTroy Baker canceled his partnership with an NFT firmwho took audio from a non-commercial text-to-speech synthesizer without permission.
You may well point out that itch.io has a section forgames tagged NFT, and while some of them are obvious parodies likeNFT Clicker, in which you click on a Bored Ape or similar ugly cartoon animal and watch numbers go up, others are not.#Monopoly.NFT, for instance, uses acryptocurrencycalled $MPLY for in-game transactions and will supposedly let you mint your character as an NFT in the future. (Which is weird when you think about the origins of Monopoly as a critique of land-grabbing capitalism calledThe Landlord’s Game.)
But then, the entire point of itch.io is that it will sell almost anything, including games it doesn’t profit from (creators are allowed to choose the percentage of their sales that go to itch, even setting it to nothing). In contrast to, say, Game Jolt, whichbanned porn gamesin a policy change that ended up affecting games that didn’t actually have any sex in them, itch is so free and easy with what can be sold there that alawyer representing Apple once said, “There are many games on Itch.io, I won’t even read the names out loud, but they are both offensive and sexualized”.
If you’d like to learn more about NFTs and you’ve got a couple of hours to spare, here’s Dan Olson with everything you need to know.
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Jody’s first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia’s first radio show about videogames,Zed Games. He’s written forRock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue,GamesRadar,Zam,Glixel,Five Out of Ten Magazine, andPlayboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody’s first article for PC Gamer was about theaudio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he’s written aboutwhy Silent Hill belongs on PC,why Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, andhow weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.
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