They targeted gamers.
Gamers.
We're a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. Over, and over, and over all for nothing more than a little digital token saying we did.
We'll punish our selfs doing things others would consider torture, because we think it's fun.
We'll spend most if not all of our free time min maxing the stats of a fictional character all to draw out a single extra point of damage per second.
Many of us have made careers out of doing just these things: slogging through the grind, all day, the same quests over and over, hundreds of times to the point where we know evety little detail such that some have attained such gamer nirvana that they can literally play these games blindfolded.
Do these people have any idea how many controllers have been smashed, systems over heated, disks and carts destroyed in frustration? All to latter be referred to as bragging rights?
These people honestly think this is a battle they can win? They take our media? We're already building a new one without them. They take our devs? Gamers aren't shy about throwing their money else where, or even making the games our selves. They think calling us racist, mysoginistic, rape apologists is going to change us? We've been called worse things by prepubescent 10 year olds with a shitty head set. They picked a fight against a group that's already grown desensitized to their strategies and methods. Who enjoy the battle of attrition they've threatened us with. Who take it as a challange when they tell us we no longer matter. Our obsession with proving we can after being told we can't is so deeply ingrained from years of dealing with big brothers/sisters and friends laughing at how pathetic we used to be that proving you people wrong has become a very real need; a honed reflex.
Gamers are competative, hard core, by nature. We love a challange. The worst thing you did in all of this was to challange us. You're not special, you're not original, you're not the first; this is just another boss fight.- some fucking sperg on Reddit
Heart is technically a millennial, so for the zoomers reading this Heart is basically a boomer. His first memories of videogames were playing his older cousin’s amiga or commodore, and videogames in arcades, then finally receiving a cassette console for Christmas (a Sega Mega Drive), and eventually a PlayStation (1) which ran cd-roms.
The common theme to all these “generations” of gaming, was that you had a console, it was offline - in fact, there was pretty much no commercial internet yet - and the whole game had to be inside the box you bought, whatever format it was.
That was it, you bought a box in a shop, came home, and the game was all there. And it better be great because chances are that you were not gonna get a new game in the next 6 months.
Historically, video games got popular in arcades first, and there was a different monetization process there: the games were often coded to be “infinite” or unbeatable, and you would insert coins and could play until you ran out of “lives”. This in turn generated contests for leaderboards and attracted more money etc.
The legacy of this is that at first, and for many years and game generations, some of these mechanisms got ported to home videogames, consoles and such. The concept of game-over for example is just a legacy of coin-to-play arcades, it makes little sense in your own home where you can anyway try all the times you want until you beat a level or a boss. Even the “cruelty” of setting you back to the start of the map or whatever, is just an unfair reminiscence of those times. But that is of no great importance to our topic at hand.
Enter the Internet
In the early 2000s, consoles started getting internet connectivity, first as an accessory, then integrated. This shifted things a lot.
First of all, until then the concept of multiplayer was very much physical, you had to be there in person next to your friend, had a second or third or fourth controller, and play the game on the same tv set with split screen. There was no 200 ping aussie 12 yo calling you a cunt over the voice-chat.
But especially, it opened the door to a different level of monetization. See, two new paths now presented themselves, and became more and more viable as internet speed got better:
Games could offer online multiplayer. You’re an only child with no friends? No problem, pay sweet $$$ to compete against random fuckos online - the insults are free!
The Game did not have to fit completely on the physical media anymore. You could provide patches, updates, and eventually the dreaded DLCs that zoomers now take for granted as if they’ve been here since the Big Bang
It is worth pointing out here that these “revolutions” that we now take for absolutely normal, were met with fierce backlash and resistance. Console wars have been around since the 80s, and having to pay for online vs. free online became one of the weapons of scrub vs anti scrub brigades.
Nintendo introducing paid online for Nintendo Switch in 2018 or so was met with endless cope by nintentoddlers, who mocked Sony and Xbox for years for having to pay for online gaming.
DLCs were introduced gradually, initially as free extra content, and slowly but not so slowly transitioned to being paid all the time. The latest evolution is that gamers already expect to get a mutilated game off the gate, and having to pay for the extra pieces needed to get the full cake. Meme very much related:
Enter Bethesda
On April 3rd, 2006, Bethesda Game Studios released the first DLC for the game The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, charging $2.50 for access to an item called “Horse Armor.” Once installed, the player could visit an Orc non-player character (NPC) and receive a set of armor to be placed on a horse (shown below). While the first set was free, each subsequent horse armor purchase would cost the player 500 gold.
On July 14th, Urban Dictionary user Ironhammer submitted an entry for "horse armor," describing it as a term used to "describe video game features that are useless and overpriced."
On November 14th, 2011, the internet humor blog Cracked published a list of the “10 most insulting things video games charge money for,” listing Horse Armor at #10.
Note for zoomers: the first iPhone launched in 2007. This was before you started spending useless dollars on your stupid phone games. It was a fucking dumpster fire of outrage on forums and imageboards, of users complaining about the stupidity and greediness of it, and fearing for what was coming next if this was allowed to pass.
Needless to say, worse things came, as market moves towards efficiency and maximum profit extraction.
This monetization process culminated - thanks also to mobile gaming - in the end result being the opposite of the starting point: videogames being available for FREE, because the studio is so sure to monetize through add-ons and loot stuff - often just cosmetic, to get back all the dev and marketing costs and more, much more, big profits.
Let’s do this but on a blockchain!
The last bull cycle saw the explosion of Decentralized Finance, DeFi in short, with the peak in 2020 and 2021. Blockchains that could host smart contracts, so ETH and derivatives/copycats, but also Solana and the Cosmos ecosystem, saw the mushroom-like proliferations of dapps that enabled users to… well, gamble.
Turns out Decentralized (not always!) Finance was still, well, finance. Lend money, borrow money, put money in instruments that supposedly pay you a yield/interest to park your money with them, and so on. Where it was not explicit ponzies and scams, it was deep down just financial instruments, either to get an interest paid on your savings (lol good luck with that) or to outright speculate on prices (futures, options).
Of course this so far solved none of the existing issues with traditional finance, or brought anything new, except the ease of access in some nations, and protection against devaluation of currencies in troubled countries - ie. keeping your money in usdt/c instead of turkish lira in your bank. Nobody got an uncollateralized loan or mortgage to buy a house, or start a new business irl. Oh wait, yeah that Zhu guy bought a mansion for his kid thanks to uncollateralized loans lmao - and now he’s trying to sell them at a loss:
So, as the whole system was reaching its peak, and people and funds were starting to run out of ideas on how to extract more juice from the onion, they started looking at videogames and their monetization evolution.
At some point someone thought something along these lines:
“Hey gamers are taking it in the ass everyday and paying for pieces of videogames or shitty cosmetic items! What if the ass pounders could be us? And promise them to get rich while playing because, you know, crypto makes you rich?”
And GameFi was born.
Basically, take some fresh out of school Unity or Unreal engine devs, make them put together a shitty demo of a 3d or 2d garbage, raise million from VCs, and promise to deliver to gamers an exciting game (lol!) with microtransactions on-chain to monetize their grinding, or leveling, or just buying useless stuff.
Basically the same ass rape but on-chain and with the delusion that you’re actually gonna generate money.
From the other side, affirmed Game Studios like Electronic Arts smelled an opportunity during the mania and tried to surf the wave by introducing the idea of NFTs in videogames. Needless to say, the reaction was quite something:
The takeaway from all this endless rant on my part, is that gamers just want to be left the fuck alone to play their videogames.
They don’t want to play-to-earn your $5 a day if you’re gonna just output copypasted uninspired garbage to them which is contributing to the death of great videogames.
They didn’t want your DLCs, they didn’t want to pay for online on top of already paying an internet bill, they didn’t want to pay for the stupid upgrades to keep their farms running on their iPhone game, and they’re telling you to fuck off with your nfts and other stuff.
They just want to play videogames. Or what’s left of them.
Nice review. I was afraid it would be another beat to death article why we need PLAY AND EARN VS P2E. So well done providing some original content. What do you think about a free gamefi game but the armor and gear are NFTs, which their value is set by the in-game economy. I think that this is a model that could work, along with the game actually being fun.
Most Gamefi was simply DeFi yield farming with extra steps and very little actual fun/lore/mythology, which is what builds a community and cult around a game to entice long-term gaming.
But with the general decline of the quality of art forms (film, TV, visual arts, music), it's no surprise that gamers get squeezed more and more while the actual games aren't as fun as they used to be.
Gamefi could work, if the game was designed well, and players could either grind for new items/skills, or pay through a native token that wasn't engineered completely for exit liquidity.
Pokemon Red still has players and speedrunners today, and the game has far less visuals/audio/etc than most triple A games these days.
Thanks for the article once again, love your substack.