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Paris, France – When video game designer Mark Venturelli was asked to speak at Brazil’s largest gaming festival, he submitted a generic title for his presentation:“The future of game design”—but that was not the talk he gave.
Instead, he launched a 30-minute tirade against the blockchain technology that underpins cryptocurrency and the games it has spawned, mostly very basic smartphone apps that lure gamers with the promise of making money.
“Everything being done in this space right now is just bad.It’s actually terrible,” he told AFP.
He’s genuinely worried about the industry he loves, particularly since the big game studios are also sniffing out the technology.
For crypto enthusiasts, blockchain will allow gamers to get back some of the money they spend on games and enjoy higher stakes.
Critics say the opposite is true:game makers will make more profit while circumventing the laws on gambling and trading, and the profit motive will kill all enjoyment.
The battle lines are drawn for what could be a long confrontation over an industry worth some $300 billion a year, according to Accenture.
Players like Venturelli can feel like they’ve succeeded on their first few forays.
Cryptocurrencies recently crashed and dragged down the in-game tokens that initially attracted gamers.
“No one is playing blockchain games right now,” Newzoo’s Mihai Vicol told AFP, saying that 90 to 95 percent of games were affected by the flaw.
Ubisoft, one of the world’s largest gaming firms, tried last year to introduce a market for one of its hit games to trade in NFTs, the digital tokens that act as receipts for anything from art to video game avatars.
But player forums, many already peppered with anti-crypto sentiment, lit up in opposition.
Even the French trade union IT Solidarity got involved, calling blockchain a “useless, expensive and ecologically mortifying technology”:a reference to the longstanding criticism that blockchain networks consume a lot of energy.
Ubisoft quickly abandoned the NFT market in Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint.
Last month, Minecraft, a world-building game popular with kids and teens, announced that it would not allow blockchain technology.
The firm criticized the “speculative pricing and investment mentality” around NFTs, saying that introducing them would be “inconsistent with the long-term joy and success of our players.”
The sector in general also has a serious image problem after a spectacular theft earlier this year of almost $600 million from Axie Infinity, a popular blockchain game in the Philippines.
Analyst firm NonFungible revealed last week that the NFT gaming sector crashed in the second quarter of this year with the number of sales falling 22 percent.
All of this points to a bleak time for crypto enthusiasts, but blockchain entrepreneurs are not giving up.
Sekip Can Gokalp, whose firms Infinite Arcade and Coda help developers introduce blockchain into their games, argues that it is still “very early days”.
He told AFP that some of the play-to-win games that drew attention had been “misguided” and that he was convinced the technology still had the potential to “revolutionize” gaming.
Reports of a culture clash between gamers and cryptocurrency fans, he said, were exaggerated and his research suggested there was substantial overlap between the two communities.
Gokalp can take heart from recent announcements from gaming giants like Sega and Roblox, a popular platform used mostly by kids, indicating that they are still exploring blockchain.
And Ubisoft, despite abandoning its most high-profile blockchain effort, still has several crypto-related projects underway.
Among the many benefits touted by crypto enthusiasts is that the blockchain allows players to carry items from one game to another, gives them ownership of those items, and stores their progress across platforms.
However, Vicol believes that blockchain games need to find other outlets to be successful.
“It could be the future,” he said, “but it’s going to be different than how people imagine it today.”
Brazilian Venturelli, whose games include the award-winning Relic Hunters, took advantage of his talk at the BIG Festival in Sao Paulo to dismiss all the benefits heralded by cryptocurrency fans as unfeasible, undesirable, or already available.
And he told AFP that play-to-win games risked real-world harm in Latin America:a particular objective for the industry—by driving young people away from occupations that bring benefits to society.
He said many people he knows, including venture capitalists and the heads of billion-dollar corporations, shared his point of view.
“They came to congratulate me on my talk,” he said.
But with new blockchain games emerging every day, accept that the battle is far from over.
By Joseph Boyle
© Agence France-Presse
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