Leaderboard: Has the gaming community ‘beaten’ NFTs?

I have to give this article in Bloomberg a lot of props for being something you don’t see very often: a piece touting the gaming community as doing something unambiguously good. “How Gamers Beat NFTs” is a nice thing to see, especially as the piece details the many ways that players have risen up with unified voices to say that nobody wants speculative financial garbage infesting video games. If asked, we will not support them; if sold, we will not buy them. Anyone trying to get into the intersection of video games and NFTs right now will be stepping through the wreckage of horrendous project failures.

But I also wonder whether or not the piece is declaring victory a bit before it’s time. Sure, we’ve either seen a lot of these projects collapse or are in the process of watching these collapses. But the piece fails to note that Sega is still moving ahead with its NFT plans and Square-Enix has made good on its threats with a project that is at least game-adjacent. Let’s also not forget Richard Garriott cashing a check and then walking away working with another NFT MMO project, or this ghoulish bit of speculation about using NFTs to force people into being NPCs.

At the same time… it’s not hard to see these as projects that just kept humming along after the crash, ignoring better evidence and launching into a market that’s already said it doesn’t want them. So let’s turn the question to a poll! Have we actually beaten NFTs, do you think?

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