I assumed that the NFT adoption would have been driven by the backlash on their current monetization.
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S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s Twitter Account tweets out an image with multiple paragraphs defending their use of NFTs in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 [UP: Oops nvm]
- Thread starter IDontBeatGames
- Start date
I assumed that the NFT adoption would have been driven by the backlash on their current monetization.
The amount of posts trying to give Phil credit for this is cringe af. I would also give credit to the fan backlash before even thinking Phil's imaginary role in all this.
NFT's can theoretically increase in value above what the developer sells them for. And if it's set up like a lot of NFT games are, then the developer gets a cut of every sale of that NFT. So EA isn't just selling a weapon skin NFT for $15 like they might currently doing with a MTX. They're getting that, plus say, a 10% cut of that NFT when it's owner sells it to someone else for $100. Or for $15,000. That's their financial incentive over current MTX systems.
Awesome. NFT's can fucking eat shit. A combination of everyone speaking up and platform holders telling them to cut it out got them to heel turn REAL fast im sure. I can dig it.
It just takes a long time to change people's perceptions about this stuff. It'll happen whether you want it to or not. Enjoy the temporary victory.
For an NFT to appreciate in value like that to the point of being worth all of the effort the asset would need to be usable moving forward, which provides all kinds of challenges. It'd also need to be very unique, meaning it likely would cost not insignificant resources to produce. In all cases it's better to just sell a cheaper skin to millions of people (that can't be resold) than to mint these NFTs. There might be some edge case where you sell whale level shit to people with too much money but that's going to be very transparent and not scale to the level EA would want to bring in a ton of revenue.
The best use for NFTs is as motivational bait to drive engagement, like Valve games do with drops. This was all figured out a long time ago by the gaming market.
MS has a co-marketing deal with GSC and the game is a marquee Game Pass title for 2022, and just one month ago Phil was saying how NFT's are exploitative and they don't want to feature games with NFT's on their store front. Obviously if there was no fan backlash, there would also be no backlash from MS on this, but, like I say, bad press for STALKER 2 = bad press for Game Pass, and MS is going to do everything in their power to mitigate that damage.
I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that there were at least discussions with Microsoft happening as all this fan backlash was occuring, and that it can be the fan backlash as well as those conversations that forced GSC's hand in this situation. Obviously they aren't going to be transparent about what happens behind the scenes with their Game Pass contracts, as they never have been, but it doesn't seem like a huge logical leap to me that they don't want games that bring bad press to Game Pass and XBOX on their services, and there maybe some wording in the contract along those lines that might have allowed MS to pull their funding if a game does have a negative impact on the perception of their service.
I mean it's highly speculative but their initial reaction to the backlash was to proceed as planned, and then an hour later they changed their mind all of a sudden. I don't think there's any reason to believe that they changed their mind that quickly because the backlash reached an entirely new level or something in those lines, so there is most certainly some other factor at play here.
a bit of noise on twitter comes and goes
the boss of the platform your game is launching on takes issue... you cancel, and apologise
phil spencer will have been a very large factor in the studios reversal
This whole image of Phil being some holy warrior for the average gamers is so hilarious man. Unless you guys have some actual evidence Phil had a role in this, then present it. Stop with this nonsense.
Thats on you to prove that Microsoft wouldn't push back on this company garnering all this negative attention to their biggest Game Pass title for the first half of 2022. Why would they want this bad press? How does that benefit Microsoft or Game Pass? There was literally someone in this thread who canceled their GP sub over this and then resubbed when GSC walked it back.
Lol bollocks. Spencer spoke about NFTs over a week ago, but didn't say he hated them. Meanwhile, GSC doubled down yesterday and then half an hour later retracted. How can you say Spencer will have been a very large factor based on that? Seriously, you've made the biggest leap ever.
It really bothers me when the overall stalker comunity was actually canceling preorders in mass because of this and thats probably a big part on the step back, but yeah, CEO at the rescue i guess
The backlash was real. I went to search for old trailers just yesterday and I only found like few days to one day old videos hating on the NFT thing. The whole first page was filled with those. I actually had to fish out for the fucking trailers. And we talking about youtubers with close to million subscribers who had hype videos about the game just recently.
I can't even recall seeing that much backlash that fast in recent memory. This was no Almighty batman jesus Phil, this was good old EVERYONE IN THE COMMUNITY INCLUDING ACTUAL INFLUENCERS being very down on it at the same time making it extremely visible to people searching for STALKER 2 content.
I can't even recall seeing that much backlash that fast in recent memory. This was no Almighty batman jesus Phil, this was good old EVERYONE IN THE COMMUNITY INCLUDING ACTUAL INFLUENCERS being very down on it at the same time making it extremely visible to people searching for STALKER 2 content.
Likewise, you better believe that a company like Microsoft or Sony with major marketing deals with a game developer, would know if they're pulling this crap before it's announced.