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Konami’s Castlevania NFT collection sold for £119,000That’s a lot of money to get basically nothing
That’s a lot of money to get basically nothing
Konami’s first auction of NFTsconcluded over the weekend, with idiots collectively spending the equivalent of £119,000 ($162k) in cryptocurrency to buy 14 database entries pointing to Castlevania artwork, music, and videos that anyone online can see for free. On one hand, thank god it was only £119,000 because if it was the millions that some ugly Twitter avatars have sold for, every other mercenary games company would ramp up their own NFT initiatives. On the other, oh god £119,000 is still so much money for basically nothing.
Castlevania Advance Collection Trailer [ESRB]Watch on YouTube
Castlevania Advance Collection Trailer [ESRB]
People haven’t bought the videos and songs and art, only NFTs of them. They’ve paid for a database to say they have some sort of nebulous connection to the asset, but not any meaningful rights to them.
It’s the digital equivalent of spending £50 to ‘name a star’, ‘buy land on the Moon’, or ‘become a Scottish laird’. Well, spending £18,500. So what does your money get you? The next item in the terms inadvertently lays it out.
“Konami is not able to preclude the purchaser from spreading on social media the fact that the purchaser purchased the NFT,” the company continue, “nor from transferring the NFT to a third party.”
Don’t worry, I didn’t spend 18 grand on this; I right-clicked to save it, like anyone can.
Still, I’m grateful that Konami are opportunistic enough to sell old gameplay videos rather than putting serious work into NFTs. Many other companies are currently looking into designing games to sell NFTs of items and things, and the way game design would need to change to enable that could well be far more irritating for years to come.
You’d hope thatEA,Ubisoft,Take-Two, and all the rest would learn from the mess Valve made ofTeam Fortress 2when they rebuilt it to fuel a virtual item market. That seems unlikely, doesn’t it. Especially afterPeter Molyneux’s next game sold £40 million in ghastly NFTs.
It seems the next step in big publishers monetising games will be “play-to-earn”, the marketing term they’re favouring for games built upon NFT items. On my personal ranking of AAA monetisation schemes, I’m tentatively saying worse than battle passes, better than map packs, worse than loot boxes? Hmm. I’m not sure. Normalising the latest cryptocurrency scam and trying to make video games part of #hustlelife is loathsome, but is it worse than some of the truly terrible loot boxes? Ah, what horrible questions the future brings!
Hit me up, AAA publishers; pay my £20,000 daily consultant fee and I’ll explain how a nice grilled cheese sandwich is the future of the industry. I can promise you it’s less daft than whatever you’re paying NFT consultants for.
