After millions in NFT sales, the hyped “play to earn” game was effectively dead in weeks.
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How Legacy became a costly crypto bust for players and a business win for Peter Molyneux
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"We came to realize I had developed a game perfect for crypto gaming" is the most honest and objectively-grounded thing Molyneux has said in 25 years.
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"We would prefer not to acknowledge anything we've done wrong. Can I interest you in a screenshot of what looks like an unbelievably bang-average Fable clone instead?"
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Two things can be true at once.
I don't think there IS a point where we can stop saying people who are conned are victims of a con. We can bemoan that they are continuing to fool themselves. We can say "I told you so", but at the end of the day, someone lied to them and they believed the lie. That makes them victims.
I am not ever going to be comfortable with the notion that we should dismiss the culpability of the con artist, because that feeds right into the narrative THEY try to use to defend their actions.
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The cryptocurrency and NFT bubbles created a lot of theoretical multi-millionaires. I would bet that most of this 'investment' was in the form of other crypto-tokens, whose 'value' was similarly inflated by, essentially, pretending that if I have a million of a meaningless token and I sell you one for a dollar, my holdings are worth a million dollars.
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Got no pushback, turned into an infamous conman. Meanwhile Sean Murray got piled on and now NMS has delivered on basically all of his promises. The conclusion is clear.
Games journalists need to bully over-promising developers. Perhaps even all developers!
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And that right there is the major issue with every single NFT based video game.
Most games are designed as fun games, and then are either sold as such, or given away for free but filled with subscriptions and/or micro-transactions. But people are buying into those games either way because the game is fun to play.
NFTs in games are sold on the promise of how much money you could earn reselling them. But if you are not playing the game because it's a fun game and instead treating it as an investment, there's very little reason to join an existing ecosystem at the bottom of the pyramid. And not a single one of these things has actually been a game anyone actually wants to play for fun. So they are both bad investments (unless you got in early and cashed out ASAP) and miserable games.
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Sorry but even this is not as bad of an idea as NFTs...if you have insurance, at least. They can actually test the ashes of your (former) money pile, and, using chemical markers, can determine the exact amount of cash that was present. Allegedly they can even do this with a very tiny percentage of the remains.
The way I understand it works, for example, if you burnt $100 there would be like .001% of the marker present, but if you burned $100,000 it would be closer to .1% etc.
Anyway, the moral of this story is, do not EVER lie on an insurance claim and say you lost $50k USD in a safe when your house burns down. They will test it, and let you know that your claim has been approved for the value of $7 or whatever they find, probably followed by a big juicy investigation and filing of charges, unless you can get someone to say they took most of the money without your knowledge or permission before the fire. Please do not ask me how I know this.
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What gets me is that even the fucking name is stupid. "Godus."
Like, really? How was that not laughed down immediately during brainstorming?
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I just don't understand how people take the 'play to earn' concept seriously.
You take an expensive endeavor, that of developing a game; and an of-value-for-entertainment-purposes-only one, that of playing it; and now you want a surplus out of which to pay the players. Obviously not happening.
So, obviously and inevitably, you slump toward a crypto-ized version of one of two things: there's the "what if we just charged money for games; like the people who actually make games" option; which normally ends up looking like a shadier version of casino poker by the time the 'web3' guys have finished with it: some sort of house rake gets built in, either to the transaction fees or to some sort of seigniorage they quietly take on stuff that they can mint and you can buy; but at least there's a more or less stable cut being taken for the work being done and then the players are left to fight it out over the rest to maintain the sense that it is possible to come out ahead.
Or you do a ponzi scheme; which seems to be more common; but is more obviously sustainable only in the very short term.
For all the 'crypto' babble none of this stuff is even remotely novel.
You take an expensive endeavor, that of developing a game; and an of-value-for-entertainment-purposes-only one, that of playing it; and now you want a surplus out of which to pay the players. Obviously not happening.
So, obviously and inevitably, you slump toward a crypto-ized version of one of two things: there's the "what if we just charged money for games; like the people who actually make games" option; which normally ends up looking like a shadier version of casino poker by the time the 'web3' guys have finished with it: some sort of house rake gets built in, either to the transaction fees or to some sort of seigniorage they quietly take on stuff that they can mint and you can buy; but at least there's a more or less stable cut being taken for the work being done and then the players are left to fight it out over the rest to maintain the sense that it is possible to come out ahead.
Or you do a ponzi scheme; which seems to be more common; but is more obviously sustainable only in the very short term.
For all the 'crypto' babble none of this stuff is even remotely novel.
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I'd like to know, too. Also, the fact that someone thought, "I have at least $60,000 that's liquid and can be used immediately. I'm gonna spend that on NFTs and crypto. That'll be a good use of my money," is absolutely baffling to me.
I would also suggest that there's some level of entitlement at play--nobody's ever told these people, "No, don't do that because it's colossally stupid" and/or they've always had access to such deep pockets that any losses they've incurred were immediately replenished and written off to someone else making bad decisions instead of themselves.
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Even if this was 100% it should have been obvious that only a steady influx of new players spending money on the game as the only source of new money to earn is not very sustainable. You do not even have to read any papers for this.
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So, not really an NFT.
Just an old-fashioned donation with new NFT paint.
Not really admirable because it’s pandering to interest in short-lived fashion. There is some positive benefit at least.
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It looks like Cool Mini or Not (CMoN) of Zombicide, Arcadia Quest, Marvel United, Massive Darkness, etc. and famous serial kickstarter with several $10m+ kickstarters is going down this route.
https://boardgamewire.com/index.php...ift-needed-to-expand-revenue-remain-relevant/
They have recently divested themselves of several core properties like Zombicide and Cthulhu: Death May Die, along with their Kickstarter fulfillment responsibilities. They still have about 15 outstanding projects to deliver on, in various states of progress.
https://www.cmon.com/project-status/#crowdfunding
Somehow there's money to invest in old NFT scams.
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My moment of realisation was about two minutes into that Milo Xbox video; from Bullfrog to here is one heck of a carer arc. Sadly this isn't Hollywood so the redemption probably isn't coming.
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Ah, I still remember that interview and my incredulous laughter reading it. It was legendary, indeed! One of the highlights of RPS, which has since IMHO gone to shite after being sold.
Molyneux could apply to be White House Press Secretary, pretty sure his background in pathological lying and grifting would be pretty welcomed there…
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Now you are laughing, but he could introduce you to the Elders of the Internet.
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Literally millions of people are willing to do it. That said the game being pay-to-win usually isn't the main point of promotional materials/commercials, with NFT games being sole exception.
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Sorry, I'm busy apply for my next career path: "Corporate Vice President of Dilithium Crystal Alignment"
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[checks notes]
Yep, it’s a Molyneux game. I enjoyed Fable, but it wasn’t as described on the box.
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If the people you are scamming are mentally ill/feeble enough to knowingly invest in NFT's, you deserve extra prison time.
Society needs to maintain the value of money. Perhaps, if you are willing to carelessly donate large sums of money to artists, you don't deserve to be a steward of that capital anymore, but you should ordinarily receive some nice jewelery, your name on a plaque, or the like.
Society needs to maintain the value of money. Perhaps, if you are willing to carelessly donate large sums of money to artists, you don't deserve to be a steward of that capital anymore, but you should ordinarily receive some nice jewelery, your name on a plaque, or the like.
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I don't think this approach works with Legacy. It's one thing to over-promise on game design and in-game simulation, and a whole different thing to sell NFTs for thousands under a vague banner of "Play to Earn" allowing you to make money from these NFTs.
Anyone who takes 10 min to evaluate the "Play to Earn" concept will quickly come to the conclusion that this is a pyramid scheme with extra steps. New marks can only "earn" if they find more marks, as soon as there are no new marks (so new money), there is no more "earn".
Not to mention, if Molyneux didn't understand the "Play to Earn" model, why did he hype it? A magical "business model" where everyone becomes a millionaire by playing video games is a clear warning sign. You don't need to know anything about crypto or gaming to immediately become extremely suspicious.
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One big issue is the notion that we need to point to exactly ONE person who is "the creator", as if they didn't have an entire team that were all working together to mutually create a vision. There are very few cases where we can say "one person created all this" and be right. Supposedly Stardew is one example, but even then, that fellow stood on the shoulders of the giants who made Harvest Moon before it. (Well, with books you can say there was a single author and be right, often enough at least.)
I think that's why we get into these situations where we hear about some creative visionary we respect, they get a whole new team, turn out something completely unexpected, and somehow we're shocked. Mighty Number 9 comes to mind. When you change the entire team that had previously been making the Mega Man games for a whole new untested one, save for the one creative lead, you're going to get different results! Sometimes very unfortunate ones, in the case of Mighty Number 9 and Space Adventure, and sometimes very pleasantly received ones, as in Ritual of the Night, and sometimes very... mixed and strange ones, as in Death Stranding.
We see this with TV shows as well. Everyone was so willing to say ONE man made "Ren & Stimpy", and it's true when he broke away, the remaining team's quality changed (I still say the later seasons of the original show are still good), but when he set out on his own with a whole new team for that "Adult Party Cartoon" nonsense, we saw that Nickelodeon were RIGHT to reign the madman in! When he's left with NO ONE to check his nonsense, you get one of the worst, disgusting yet somehow incredibly boring cartoons ever, with some barely disguised personal issues drawn right there onto the screen on top of that. Frankly, I'm glad that the property isn't his and I can buy a box set without it giving him a single red cent, knowing what I know about the guy at this point. It's also a relief to know he was NOT in fact solely responsible for the show, and without the amazing writer and the rest of the talent, it wouldn't have been a shadow of what it was.
And so, when I see someone like George R.R. Martin bemoan when directors make changes to movies, I mean I GET it, on some level I do... but then I realize that sometimes the movie really is better than the book, or is at least a distinct enough story that it deserves to exist in it's own right. The Shining movie's changes made it better FOR those changes.
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Populous II was one of my favourite games ever. [I liked the original but I didn't think it had enough variety.] Powermonger was good too. It was around Dungeon Keeper that he started to lose me, and I never played Black and White. Still, there was enough magic in both of those that lots of people raved about them. Magic Carpet was big too.
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This ass hole "lost" >$1,000,000 on this obvious scam?!?!
Someone this stupid SHOULD be destitute!
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For people thinking about going and turning resources into products in a game to sell for money, I have got some amazing news for you. . .
In the real world we call that a job, and you can actually get paid to turn resources into products, or provide services.
In the real world we call that a job, and you can actually get paid to turn resources into products, or provide services.
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True....but a job has all the messiness of actual scarcity of both time and physical resources. Buying up all the cucumber emojis to manipulate markets has none of those things. As Spiffing Brit taught us all a couple years ago:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u372HKrw5eA
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Reading the article made me nostalgic for the Battlecruiser 3000AD and Duke Nukem Forever era of gaming scandals.
Merely overpromising and underdelivering feels less cynical than the NFT, Kickstarter and Star Citizen era.
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Womp womp.
It's so hard to feel any kind of sympathy for people losing money on clearly rigged gambling schemes.
But also, f--k Peter Molyneux - I won't touch any new game he makes with a ten foot pole. He got that greed and decided to big into NFT gambling scams, so I won't come anywhere near his games in the future.
It's so hard to feel any kind of sympathy for people losing money on clearly rigged gambling schemes.
But also, f--k Peter Molyneux - I won't touch any new game he makes with a ten foot pole. He got that greed and decided to big into NFT gambling scams, so I won't come anywhere near his games in the future.
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Doing due diligence is hard, but man if I'm about to drop 7 figures on something, I will at least take an hour to, I dunno, fucking Google the people in question?
It's not like you're sitting in an office with someone pressuring you saying "you sign this contract now or not at all!".
Once again proving that just because we have the world's information at our fingertips we are not any smarter as a species.
It's not like you're sitting in an office with someone pressuring you saying "you sign this contract now or not at all!".
Once again proving that just because we have the world's information at our fingertips we are not any smarter as a species.
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XSportSeeker
Ars Scholae Palatinae
The sad part of entire write ups about NFT and Crypto failures is that nothing really comes out of it. Told 'ya so, on to the next.
It's just legalized scam, period. Victims contributed to all of this, despite repeated multiple warnings, and there is no payoff, neither for them, not for society itself.
We have these post mortens that serves as cautionary tales, we have major court cases that mostly ends up nowhere, we have these huge game industry figureheads getting their reputations f'd up so they get limited to earn most of their money on past work... but nothing actually changes. It's just off to the races for the next scam.
I mean, it should be obvious for anyone who listened to the ad for these NFT crap enterprises that is was a mix of Ponzy scheme, pyramid, MLMs, and just regular fraud with other financial crimes thrown in - but it never changes, because this has become an integral part if not the majority of what finance truly is these days in most late-stage capitalist nations.
It should be logical by exercise of basic economic concepts that all these things are going nowhere, and it'll always benefit a few at the cost of everyone else.
From the fact that several of the main systems in the country already have part or were bought in on this - including politics, justice, banking, investment markets and whatnot, to the fact that we now have huge portions of the economy partially or fully dependent on these things, and everything in between - the rot has already spread so far an wide that correction would imply bringing huge parts of the nation down to start over. And no one wants that. We've grown too accommodated and comfortable in our positions for real change. Middle to upper classes are in that position, while those that fall bellow the poverty line don't have the information, don't have the power, and can't do anything about it. So we all conform. Knowledge on it is just a source of hatred and frustration.
Ethics thrown out the window because it's just an obstacle for everyday operations.
It's back when this crap started happening, when countries failed to stop the encroachment of monopolies that fuels this type of thing, that too much money and control enabled bad actors to corrupt the entire system, that we started falling into this black hole.
And this is already a long time ago. We have generations of people that were born and raised looking at this as normal, as just how things work.
One can argue with plenty of evidence to show that the current descent towards populist proto-dictatorships, which are now fueling senseless wars, genocide, ethnic cleansing, prejudice, racism, indiscriminate killings, war crimes and much more started with this. Corruption at the economic level that went this far gave room for fascist ideals and a self destructive information ethos to take hold, and we're just falling in further into it.
Molyneux, in the end, is no different to so many other Big Tech names, so many politician names, so many head of banks, hedge funds, fintechs, so many in the millionaire and billionaire class, that I find it tiring to even come up with a tirade against the guy.
He's indistinguishable from the vast majority of the one per centers of the world who makes a living by stealing money from the rest. The position of CEOs, presidents, and whatnot these days is just a position to come up with creative ideas on exploiting as much people as possible.
It's just the cancer that is growing to kill all of us, including themselves when this cycle is over.
It's just legalized scam, period. Victims contributed to all of this, despite repeated multiple warnings, and there is no payoff, neither for them, not for society itself.
We have these post mortens that serves as cautionary tales, we have major court cases that mostly ends up nowhere, we have these huge game industry figureheads getting their reputations f'd up so they get limited to earn most of their money on past work... but nothing actually changes. It's just off to the races for the next scam.
I mean, it should be obvious for anyone who listened to the ad for these NFT crap enterprises that is was a mix of Ponzy scheme, pyramid, MLMs, and just regular fraud with other financial crimes thrown in - but it never changes, because this has become an integral part if not the majority of what finance truly is these days in most late-stage capitalist nations.
It should be logical by exercise of basic economic concepts that all these things are going nowhere, and it'll always benefit a few at the cost of everyone else.
From the fact that several of the main systems in the country already have part or were bought in on this - including politics, justice, banking, investment markets and whatnot, to the fact that we now have huge portions of the economy partially or fully dependent on these things, and everything in between - the rot has already spread so far an wide that correction would imply bringing huge parts of the nation down to start over. And no one wants that. We've grown too accommodated and comfortable in our positions for real change. Middle to upper classes are in that position, while those that fall bellow the poverty line don't have the information, don't have the power, and can't do anything about it. So we all conform. Knowledge on it is just a source of hatred and frustration.
Ethics thrown out the window because it's just an obstacle for everyday operations.
It's back when this crap started happening, when countries failed to stop the encroachment of monopolies that fuels this type of thing, that too much money and control enabled bad actors to corrupt the entire system, that we started falling into this black hole.
And this is already a long time ago. We have generations of people that were born and raised looking at this as normal, as just how things work.
One can argue with plenty of evidence to show that the current descent towards populist proto-dictatorships, which are now fueling senseless wars, genocide, ethnic cleansing, prejudice, racism, indiscriminate killings, war crimes and much more started with this. Corruption at the economic level that went this far gave room for fascist ideals and a self destructive information ethos to take hold, and we're just falling in further into it.
Molyneux, in the end, is no different to so many other Big Tech names, so many politician names, so many head of banks, hedge funds, fintechs, so many in the millionaire and billionaire class, that I find it tiring to even come up with a tirade against the guy.
He's indistinguishable from the vast majority of the one per centers of the world who makes a living by stealing money from the rest. The position of CEOs, presidents, and whatnot these days is just a position to come up with creative ideas on exploiting as much people as possible.
It's just the cancer that is growing to kill all of us, including themselves when this cycle is over.
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It seems like, even in terms of Ponzi-like games, Gala Games kneecapped themselves hard with this decision. Whether it's because they saw the writing on the wall and wanted to cash out ASAP or because they got exceptionally greedy, there's no way that you can have a functioning economy when the house pulls 85% of all funds out of the system.
There's money sinks, then there's whatever this was - Fissure? Black hole?
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I cant help feeling that someone that has that kind of money to throw it around senselessly probably did not earn it in the first place. The only valid excuse is if he is getting old and losing his senses.
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Even though it's 4 years old, Folding Ideas' video "Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs " is still incredibly relevant.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
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