Maybe they can save the artist’s disappointment by replacing it with AI art.

Wait.

Evangelists of the stuff will tell you that you can own your own digital corner of the information highway (Second Life came out in 2003, and most MMOs have housing), or that you can trade rare items with your fellow players (TF2 and Counter-Strike have been doing this forever). Then there’s this idea that you “own the item” in question more than you would otherwise (you don’t, you own a certificate that’s associated with it, and the item will vanish if the infrastructure does). Then there’s the whole “you could use a sword from one game in another game!” nonsense, which I think we can all agree was cooked up by people who don’t understand how game design works on even a fundamental level.

This is so on point for the web3 space, and parts of the AI space too.

Evangelists waltz in and berate you for not understanding how gloriously awesome their system is… without even making a cursory effort to check if it already exists, much less accumulate a deep understanding and appreciation like they expect you to do.

Despite the fact that we’ve sort of universally agreed that NFT games aren’t going to happen

We said the same about microtransaction and energy systems

This trash ass games trailer literally says pay to win at the start

Good keep wasting money Ubisoft maybe one day you will finally go bankrupt having to sell beyond good and evil to someone who actually cares and remove your launcher from our games.

I’m not going to defend Ubisoft here.

I will make a comment about NFCs. Basically, if you’re trying to validate a set number of items in a digital market, NFTs are not the worst way to do it. In the context of a video game, it would be that you have the NFT for, let’s say, a limited character skin, associated to your game profile/account/whatever. As long as that token is attached to your account, you get access to that skin. If you trade it out, you lose access to that skin in the game… As an example.

NFTs would accomplish that goal, while being (at least in theory) decentralized, and in theory it’s immune to errors and exploitation.

All of that being said: there are much better ways to accomplish the same with less. Any blockchain, by its very nature, will eventually become a slow, unmanageable mess because anything written to the ledger is immutable. So the ledger will continue to grow and grow and grow until it’s so large that it’s unmanageable, slow as shit, and just garbage to try to use/work with.

For shit like digital art or whatever, NFTs make even less sense. All you’re actually buying is essentially a receipt that you paid money to someone for the receipt. It’s a lot like going to a store to buy air. You pay for it, get your receipt and now you “own” some air. The only thing that proves you “own” air, is the receipt. If you lose the receipt, oh well, you can’t prove you “own” the air anymore, but you’re still 100% able to use the air, to fill your lungs, and breathe for another day, whether you “own” it or not.

The only difference with a “web3” game is that owning the NFT may give you access to stuff inside the game that you otherwise wouldn’t have.

Great in concept, horrible in practice.

Evert artist’s effort is mostly wasted. Audiences are awful, stupid, fickle, timid people who don’t deserve or are capable of fully appreciating anything beyond New Country.