true, but you arent buying a blockland key for $8k thinking that it's a good investment for the future. you're paying $20 for a game you immediately play, without any expectation of being able to make money.
This. Has anyone seen this "The Sandbox" game? It used to be a great mobile game back then, that I actually did enjoy a lot. Then later the brand was acquired by some chinese company and they created a blockchain-based 3D game. The alpha pass (to actually play the game) was costing around $10k, no joke. (Although the game will be free, as the devs claims; Not sure if that will be true though, knowing how schemy some of these crypto communities are) Sure, if you were early and bought some of these "virtual lands", you had good chances to acquire it. I remember a time where I would buy a game for an one-time fee and enjoy it, not making it an investment opportunity, especially with prices that are tremendous and it's worrying me how people handle this as if it were minor. We're talking about huge amounts of cash being exchanged here. Even more worrying is the fact that these games often have a kid-friendly environment, encouraging very young (often inexperienced and naive) players to start into this rabbit hole. And if anyone of you ever experienced gambling addicts and trading addicts that lost everything (I saw it happening with a school friend), it's not nice. Trust me.
I really hope so much that this NFT hype never becomes the norm of the gaming industry of the future. Just awful. Many modern games are already being trashed into pure lootboxes and microtransactions, and now we've got gambling and trading game assets with huge amounts of money. Just the fact that STALKER wanted to join in on this NFT hype (but thankfully listened to the community and stopped it) is a cause for concern for me. Especially the quality of future games will only suffer more, since future upcoming garbage will be hyped up anyway, because people want to make a quick buck, just like it often happens with "stuffcoins" at the moment. This is all a pyramid scheme with extra steps, IMO. I'm not against the concept itself, but I hope that this concept stays in a minority and doesn't become the standard and replaces classical game concepts. Because there are still people who like to play games for fun and want to pay an one-time-fee (e.g. $20) to get access to all game content (or want to gain through game skills and game progress) and not to additionally "gamble" with real money and buy game content for horrendous prices.
Just by the fact some in-game assets are sold for crazy prices like $10,000 (eg "The Sandbox") or the Alpha Pass costing almost $15,000, is just crazy. If you enter too late, then you have almost no chance to participate without throwing your average annual salary on it and then additionally with the high risk of losing everything (because I can already smell from afar the future scammers who will now also spread their NFT concept in the game industry, hype it up like crazy, naive people throwing all their money in and then devs make themselves disappear secretly). This also makes such games themselves almost a system that can only be played by the super-rich, respectively those who jumped in early. Is this really what the computer games of the future are supposed to look like? I thought lootboxes and microtransactions were bad. But this really has me worried.
Sure, it's a nice thing to do for a quick buck and possibly even long-term investment, and I can already see the defenders of this concept throwing stones at me. But I see all this from an ethical point of view. Games are not a gambling product to me, but passion, entertainment and relaxation. If you absolutely want to make money, you should get into the stock market or stick to classic coin trading, there are plenty of opportunities there as well. But please leave the gaming industry in peace. Indie developers have enough to suffer and especially people for whom games are more than just pure cashcows. Just looking at platforms like ROBLOX, where (especially very young) game developers have to pay off almost 70% of their revenue they make from their games to ROBLOX Corp. shows me where this is all going. Well, "The Sandbox" is supposed to be decentralized, that might be a plus. But that doesn't solve the numerous other problems that arise from this and that I have already mentioned here. When I already see centralized companies like ROBLOX and Facebook fighting each other for supremacy in the Metaverse concept, I see a very big danger emerging here. I could even imagine that if these giants prevail, numerous other games of this kind and their players will suffer terrible losses. So, be loving careful what you spend your money on. This isn't your average lemon store. This is literally ~100k of cash we're talking about here. There is no regulation, no refunds, etc. Take this stuff serious.
Excuse me, if I might be wrong on this matter. I think I am getting old, so I am not quite following the new buzzwords being thrown around and I definitely might misunderstand something about NFTs. Admittingly, my perspective here is mostly shaped by my intuition and conclusions I can draw from what I know. Again, I might be wrong. So, correct me where I am wrong. But I personally can't agree with the hype, it just doesn't make any sense to me. Looking at all these videos from these YouTube entrepreneurs, hyping this all up, advocating how to make quick buck, etc.. it just feels so fake to me. It feels like Post-Covid Butters trying to lure me into this NFT stuff.
Also, has actually anyone seen this "The Sandbox" game? Honestly, IMO it looks like complete dogstuff. And the only reason (what a surprise) this is being hyped up is because people expect to make a quick buck with this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZDI8ML_QSU