NF Tease

[Dark Jaguar]

Ubisoft are the first.  Just to be clear, NO ONE wants this except shareholders.  We don't even know how Ubisoft intends to use this... nothing tech.  And it IS literally nothing.

Let me explain what an NFT actually is.  It's a cryptographic receipt of purchase.  That's it.  And it is less "powerful" than a printed receipt.  It isn't an encoded version of whatever you "buy" with it.  Whatever you buy stands apart from the NFT.  It isn't a method of purchasing digital goods.  Many NFTs don't actually give you full rights to whatever you buy.  It isn't a foolproof way to buy actual copyrights to a good.  Many of these things are being "sold" as just a copy.  It isn't legal protection from right clicking to save.  Whatever happened between you and a seller behind the scenes, once you post a monkey online, it's free for anyone to save onto their device.  You willingly SENT that to everyone.  It isn't theft proof.  Someone sneaks onto your machine, they can "take" your whole collection of NFTs pretty easily.

But, they COULD actually do something for games.  No, not whatever Ubisoft or Forbes suggest we should do with it.  That would be worthless.

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, that NFT images are actually... buying a URL which will be a dead link in the near future... is honestly funny.  THAT is what NFT/crypto people think is the future of digital ownership?  "Owning" a link?  ... Yeah, uh...


Meanwhile, in news surprising probably nobody, Peter Molyneux is working on an NFT game, apparently.  Because of course he is.

[Dark Jaguar]

And you don't even own that URL.  The URL is getting bought and sold independently of your NFT no matter what you do with it because the national DNS registry doesn't care about NFTs.

[Dark Jaguar]

There is now a Bob Ross NFT...  For a physical Bob Ross toy.  Why?!  You know what evidence I have that I bought the Bob Ross toy?  The toy!

[A Black Falcon]

There are some things that really make you wonder, and here is one of them: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/peter-m...on-in-nfts

... I really hope that the people spending 40 million British pounds on PETER MOLYNEUX IN-GAME NFTS are fools who want to lose their money, because otherwise... what?  Huh?  Some things about this world don't make sense anymore... heh.

Seriously though, I get the concept of the game.  It apparently started as a regular game about building a business, and then the NFT thing was added more recently.  And having in-game ways to make real money in a game about building a business makes sense, though it shouldn't be that way, games are not something which should be about that kind of thing -- while there are lots of ways to make money in games, how is this a game if it's about really making real money which takes advantage of other real people?  That is not a game any longer.  That's a "game" which is now a cryptocurrency money-making grift.  A grift backed by Peter Molyneux, he who has a pretty totally failed track record over the past decade, and a mixed one over the decade before that.

Seriously, what?  Unless it really is all just money-laundering, why in the world would people immediately buy up all of this games' NFTs?  Sure, it gets you one-of-a-kind businesses in the game, but there MUST be easier ways to earn cryptocurrency than this, for people in on crypto and its NFT scam subsidiary...

(Those people buying all of those NFTs sure will love their investments once the game gets shut down and all of their NFTs are rendered worthless, since all an NFT is is a hyperlink after all...)

[Dark Jaguar]

ABF, it makes perfect sense and is fully in line with how businesses have been operating since Reaganomics.  

This is a natural progression, and once you realize that this is exactly the world that rich capitalists have built for us and told us was good and free then nothing about this will surprise you.  You have the republicans, who want to regress into a sort of thuggish aristocracy, and then you have liberals, who want more freedom and voting rights BUT are too comfortable with our current economic reality and thus don't even want to give us the most basic sort of government oversight, like Nancy Pelosi straight up refusing to even consider restricting congress and the senate from owning stocks, because "freedom".  The government's corrupt, but I've already mentioned that.

Instead let's focus on this.  We have this problem in our society with "Great Man Theory".  We idolize these "great men", male industrialists that are the true movers and shakers, and we know that because they're in charge of giant corporations.  There's this idea of them being these Bruce Wayne/Tony Starks of the world, inventing everything by the sweat of their own brow.  Any sort of restraint on their behavior is a shackle holding back the Great Works that will propel us right into space.  So, no one bats an eye when Amazon (who has demonstrated that they'll keep people working right through a tornado and that they will take ANY steps possible to prevent unionization) comes along and says hey we're here to make true AI.  No one is even a little bit worried that this or that giant corporation is going on and on about colonizing space, (space being that place outside even the physical reach of all terrestrial government).

In THAT environment, and knowing as many people even here have said over the years that companies don't love you, they don't even like you, they just want to make all the money forever at any cost, well NFTs make perfect sense.  They're a pyramid scheme that isn't illegal (yet), and so long as it's still legal and so long as no one understands it enough to complain, they will pursue it.

Also, customers aren't their customers any more.  Stock holders are.  Once someone is openly traded, every decision they make must satisfy them, and the ONLY thing that satisfies isn't just sustainable profits (a sensible goal) but MORE profits than last quarter, forever, like cancer.  That is the singular thing that could possibly explain Activision-Blizzard firing a record number of employees in the MOST profitable year of the company's operation.  That is the only thing that explains why so very many of us, before the NFT age has even gotten underway, are LOUDLY decrying NFTs as something literally NO gamer actually wants in their games, and yet in spite of that wall of resentment, they refuse to change course at all.

It all makes perfect sense.  You want to know how people like me and Sterling and so on have been able to so very accurately predict what new awful thing these companies are going to do?  We ask one question.  "Will this, in the immediate future, stand to grow their profits over last quarter?"  If the answer is yes, they are going to do it.  That's all there is to it.  Any naïve sentiments about "customer good will" are secondary to that.  That only counts if it affects the answer to the first question, period.

[A Black Falcon]

This is one of the most amusing Doom mods since what, Barney Doom? :)

[Dark Jaguar]

Here's an even better one:



Be wary, Ubisoft have made it clear that these first NFTs are the camel's nose- snuffling away under the tent flap.