Are you
tired of Jim Sterling's formula?
Are you
sick of sitting through 20 minutes of content for a point that we could tell you in 3 minutes?
Are you
outright done with the same 4 talking points week after week?
Do you think Jim is/was
capable of making good points but his repetition results in the many points you'd agree with becoming apathetic white noise from an over-privileged fat man?
If you said
yes to any of these, then don't worry.
Gloria From Pokemon Sword (and Shield) Presents:
THE PRE-JIM JIMQUISITION
with your host: not Jim Sterling
Today's Predictive Topic: NFTs Are Gambling
Hardly a bold statement, huh? But it's true. NFT's are gambling in the eyes of a sane man. When someone buys an NFT, it is solely with the hopes of it eventually having more value so they can sell it. Any attempts to give them purpose (like with video games) tend to fail because the appeal to most block-chain-bros is how unregulated and decentralized it is, but functionality on any massive scale requires centralization. Oh what a whacky farce this has turned out to be.
However, what about the other angle? How many gaming companies has gone whole-hog on NFTs? Square Enix literally sold off their western IPs just to go all in on this trend... that is already dying from lack of stability. I hope it was worth selling Lara Croft (one of the few good action female characters), Hitman (one of the few creative mission-based series) and Deus-Ex (one of the few series to get away with larger commentary) for something you only know about because of press reports and SEO.
That's the actual reason NFTs are gambling. Every business choice is a risk, but there's always unforeseen outcomes or chances for things to go south. But you know what separates gambling from risk taking? Failure, or rather the inevitability of it. You can always take a risk and in theory always come out on top. If you gamble long enough, you'll eventually lose. And with NFTs, it always ends in a loser. There's the actual point of them as we see them: sell them off for a profit through fear of missing out, but once no one is willing to pay for what the price increase would be, the owner has lost.
Ubisoft lost simply by playing the game, because no one wanted their little trinkets. Took forever to unlock, and was too centralized to a single game for it to work. Ubisoft couldn't get anyone to find value in them, so they ended up losing. And now their NFT plans appear to be on hold. There's something to be noted here: unlike whaling through microtransactions, NFTs have the unique problem of relying on whale-to-whale combat, if you will. You can sell overpriced Microtransaction and it only takes a key set of people with more dollars than sense to make it work. But with NFTs, you have to limit how many you sell, and you only get a portion of future sales (if that). I think most NFT projects, since profit is clearly the only motivator, would be better of being egregious micro-transaction games on mobile devices and PC instead of these NFT plots. After all, micro transactions have no upper limits. The only real appeal NFTs have from a company standpoint is the lack of a start-up cost.
So, based on what companies are both willing to say and legally required to publicly reveal to investors, it would appear NFTs are something you need to devote a lot of time into (undermining the idea of the low start-up cost), don't work with gaming beyond what digital stores already do (anyone wanting them to work across all games has a Theranos level of lacking in common sense), have a reasonable chance at failure right from the get-go (Ubisoft is down! Everybody, point and laugh!) and may very well have a lower profit margin than the evil-but-integrated mobile market.
I guess it's a case of seeing a few people making millions, so naturally a
company should be able to make
billions, right?
…Right?
I thought I'd try something a little fun. Just a quick bit where I try to make a shorter, better Jimquisition before our boy Jim released his. My do this from time to time if people are interested.
