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Mike Shinoda, rapper from Linkin Park is the latest celebrity to weigh in on the NFT in gaming craze, having an inversely proportionate amount of confidence to actual game development knowledge.
In a tweet with almost as many retweets as there are replies, Mike Shinoda deals out a straight-up lie about NFTs in games- that by hypothetically owning an NFT item, you’d be allowed to carry it into any game you want.
“Imagine taking your favorite skin from Valorant, and using it Fortnite. And not paying extra, because you own it. Then using it in CoD, Minecraft, even Twitter, IG.“, one of his tweets reads.
It should be noted that his NFT thoughts are all over the place in a thread, with this particularly egregious one being a reply to someone else- now hilariously ratioed at over 2,000 quote retweets to 71 replies.
“This is extremely disappointing and absolutely not how game development works. :/“, says Jess, UI designer at Raven Software, one of the studios working on Call of Duty Warzone.
Tim Spencer, Lead Designer at TT Games was quick to remind the rapper that that’s just not how game design works:
It’s not just game developers either, as GamesIndustry.Biz News Editor Danielle Partis also took aim with a reference to Shinoda’s song Remember The Name.
“This is 10% luck, 20% skill, 80% concentrated digital shill“, Partis says.
Industry critic James-Stephanie Sterling also chimed in, calling out Shinoda’s justification as an after-the-fact one.
“They started selling these useless things and are now desperately trying to make up reasons to justify them existing”, they said.
The Nightmare Of Inter-Studio Communication
Even if you wanted the technical limitations aside, there’s also the issue of IP rights. Months ago, Smash Bros series producer Masahiro Sakurai talked at length about just how much of a logistic nightmare it was adding Sora from Kingdom Hearts to the game, due to the fact he was jointly owned by Disney and Square Enix.
“It’s fair to say that [Sora’s] addition required more coordination than other fighters”, Sakurai said.
While Sakurai never goes into the details, it’s almost universally understood that Disney’s licensing of its characters can be a nightmare- Marvel Vs Capcom Infinite wasn’t allowed to show Marvel characters losing to Capcom’s heroes, and Donald and Goofy are hilariously missing from Sora’s Smash Bros appearance.
Once you do get into the technical limitations, there’s a whole other can of worms- making assets work between games is a full-time job, and any game would have to sink in resources for something with no actual value back to their games, as Tim mentioned earlier. Pokemon has so much trouble with its assets that Sword and Shield couldn’t even launch with every single Pokemon in it, and that’s before having to accommodate the possibility of someone demanding other assets work in the game because they “own” it.
Reselling Digital Assets
Mike Shinoda also had one more nuclear take about the ability to resell items using NFTs:
“This is a key point. Reselling items you acquired in game. These things have value. If you got lucky and have 2 rare items, what if you could sell or gift the 2nd. For real money, not just in game cash? “.
In the interest of journalistic integrity, I should point out that this already happens. It’s a bannable offense, even. It’s not a new or revolutionary idea, it’s one so incredibly stale that every MMO already has it baked into their terms of service.
Even when it’s not banned, it’s still not new- Warframe has a thriving player economy where players trade rare mods for Platinum- the game’s premium currency.
Shinoda’s embrace of NFTs is just another in a line of people trying to pretend the format has anything new or valuable to it when the truth is it’s just people trying to make money off of attaching their own platform to an already-working system.
