NFTs with fewer steps, but yeah.
Powderhorn@beehaw.org 2 days ago
Oh, no!
Anyway …
On a more serious note, if this is what people choose to waste money on, that’s of course their right. It’s just NFTs with extra steps.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
theangriestbird@beehaw.org 2 days ago
yeahhh at least in this context there’s a built-in playground where you can show off your expensive purchases. NFTs are insufferable because NFT owners are always trying to talk to you about their NFTs. I think CS players know that their skins are only cool to other CS players. lol
Powderhorn@beehaw.org 2 days ago
The whole concept of in-game purchases is just foreign to me. I wasn’t even willing to pay 99 cents for a few extra lives in Candy Crush. This market being worth billions is frankly unfathomable.
theangriestbird@beehaw.org 2 days ago
as someone who has a few fortnite skins, I can speak to that side of the market. When you’re playing a game like that, which is high budget and also free-to-play, it’s easy to talk yourself into spending a few dollars. You get sick of using the default skins, everything else looks so cool, and you’ve been getting hours and hours of joy out of the game, haven’t you? In a way, it’s like you’re showing support to the kindly devs that gave you this game for free. Then once you have a couple, you might get addicted to the rush of joining a party with your friends and hearing their reactions to your new skin or dance. Plus, if you’re like me, you might just enjoy the inherent humor to watching Master Chief do a TikTok dance. It’s actually enhancing your enjoyment of the game. Then, $50 later, you finally realize that you’ve been getting diminishing returns on the enjoyment with each purchase, or you just get bored with the game overall, so you finally stop spending money on new skins.
That’s been my experience. When we talk about the potential for “billions”, most of that money is coming from the whales. The people for whom money is no object, so they never hit the point where they realize that buying the skins isn’t bringing them any real happiness anymore. And of course, in the CounterStrike market, these skins are resellable, so there’s also a collector’s mindset that takes hold. Either you treasure your collection of high value skins, or you get caught up in the rush of pulling an expensive skin from a crate because you know how much you can sell it for.
Powderhorn@beehaw.org 2 days ago
I guess I just don’t understand motivations in the F2P market. Like, I’m happy to pay a reasonable price for a game, but I have no interest in being nickeled and dimed – I can’t tell you how many games I’ve noped out on because of that shit. Like, if Factorio charged for cosmetic add-ons, that would just be ludicrous. Either you made a playable game for the price of entry, or you didn’t.
I seriously need to find a grift to hook people in for monthly payments.
Rose@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
NFTs are at least independent and won’t disappear if one corporation goes down. Other than that, they’re one and the same, and it’s insane that the same gamers who worship Valve are often the first to bash NFTs.
UnpledgedCatnapTipper@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
Unless it’s the web host for the file, because the nft is just a link. The AWS outage showed that quite clearly.
Rose@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
AWS going down wouldn’t erase the NFT out of existence. Valve closing down would certainly remove every Steam market item.