Team17, publishers of Worms, Overcooked, and Aggro Crab, recently decided to get into the NFT racket. Even more recently, it decided to pull out of this racket after discovering that everyone hates NFTs and also they suck. It took around 24 hours for the complete flip flop, around the same time the Stalker 2 team decided to go back on its decision to include NFTs. Troy Baker, who tried to offset criticism of his own NFT partnership by calling critics “haters” in the announcement, took a little longer, but eventually backed out too and apologised for the haters remark. Why does this keep happening?
Information on NFTs is freely available. On the one hand, the idea that you can take a gun from one game to another is ludicrous and infeasible, while they cause huge environmental damage and are partly responsible for the current hard drive shortage. They’re also leading to stolen art being minted and sold without the artist’s permission, and are a Ponzi-scheme style scam designed to scam people. On the other hand, they can make you a lot of money.
That’s all there is to it. Making money is the only reason to get into this business. We’ve seen claims you’ll be able to copyright and own a colour on the blockchain, with royalties due to you for every use. I respect such an open grift far more than I do the claims NFTs will be revolutionary in some vague, undefinable way. You need some suckers to make money off of, and you need to lure them in with the promise of future riches, or with comparisons to work changing technology like the car (and they’re getting in on the ground floor!), but it’s just a grift. It’s all just a grift. So why are people backing out?
The public perception on NFTs is readily available, as are their various flaws. On the other hand, money.
Team17 is the most surprising case. The NFT scam involved selling pictures of Worms rather than monkeys, but it was a pretty straight NFT grift. You give them lots of money, you receive a jpeg. Simple. Surely the company knew before going into it that this would be an unpopular but profitable move, so why did 24 hours of bad press lead to a complete 180? Was it because of internal pressure from the likes of Aggro Crab and Overcooked? But then, surely you put the feelers out internally on something like this, or given that a recent survey found NFTs to be as unpopular amongst devs as they were with the public, you just suck it up and make money.
Stalker 2’s NFTs were even more naive, with the theory being you could turn your own avatar into an NFT. Why? Answers on a postcard please. It doesn’t seem like there’s any profit to be made here, which means it’s all of the bad stuff and none of the good. Did the devs just drink the Kool-Aid and expect everyone would think monkey jpegs are cool?
Then there’s Troy Baker, who seems to straddle the line. I have no issues in believing Troy Baker, the man who once posted a Teddy Roosevelt speech in reaction to the criticism that TLOU2 was a bit too long, might be somewhat detached from reality. He once threatened an unassuming assistant at his Far Cry audition in-character, in order to better sell himself as Pagan Min. The assistant was likely terrified, or at the very least grossly uncomfortable, but it got him the job.
You might think, then, that Baker had been sold snake oil by NFT bros, except he explicitly responded to “haters” in his announcement, suggesting he was well aware of the backlash. More likely Baker was banking on his popularity for a ‘pump and dump’ scheme, which many have speculated is the motivation behind celebrity investment.
The idea behind a pump and dump is that you pump up the prices (through celebrity investors, pop culture saturation, or talking about NFTs on Fallon), then you dump by selling your own investments at an inflated price - a price you deliberately inflated for this very reason. If that was the plan, Baker seems to have dumped without the pump.
This isn’t the end of NFTs. Ubisoft and Square Enix are pushing ahead regardless, knowing that they can weather the storm and rake in cash. But after so many schemes have been torn down so easily, they don’t feel as inevitable as the snake oil salesmen like to say they are. NFTs lead to massive backlash with the potential to make massive money. Why some people still think they can have one without the other is beyond me.