GTA Publisher Take-Two Thinks NFTs Are A Good "Fit" But Wants To "Stay Away From Speculation"

"We believe in rare goods, we believe in collecting your money"

GTA? More like Non-Fungible Theft Auto

I'm so glad that the world's end might be caused by some pixels on a screen using too much energy.

And we believe you should do some game testing before you release a game <--rest of the gaming world

“We want to make sure that consumers always have a good experience every time they engage with our properties and losing money on a speculation is not a good experience“ Read: Better never ever pre-order our games!

How on the screaming corpse of earth is anything digital a rare good, unless you decide to make it so by design? And than it isn´t a rare good but a deluding scam.

It's great news that the game sol.... Oh, wait...

Well, it's great that they've written off NF... Oh, wait...

@Zuljaras Nope! It's even stupider then that. You literally do not own what you are purchasing. Let's say I "mint" 100 NFTs and number them 1 to 100. When you buy an NFT you are buying one of those numbers. To add "value" to them people are giving them pixel art, art, sounds, most of which are stolen assets and giving each spot in the line a picture. You do not own the copyright, the license to use, the art itself. You just own the spot in line next to the picture.

Best way I can put it. You know when you go to a parking garage at an event? You then pay your money, find your spot and you get your little thingy that says hey, remember you parked at green baboon 37? Yea...thats an NFT. Only more useless.

@HotGoomba
I'll do you one better. Pixels on a screen WITHIN a screen using too much energy.

@SladeStrife Reading the comments made around the Ubisoft NFT stories suggests that NFTs could be used as a way of verifying DLC purchases, in such a way that you could resell that DLC to another user.

So say I bought a physical copy of Immortals Fenyx Rising, and a bunch of DLC for it. Some time later I can then sell the cartridge AND THE DLC to someone else. Whereas previously the DLC would be stuck on my account, even if I no longer own the game, and whoever buys the cart would then have to buy the DLC themselves.

So yeah, I’m renting a parking space in that garage, and then selling my ticket to the next driver when I’m done with it. And the garage owner only gets paid once (though I bet they charge a lot more for it for that very reason).

If that’s true, it’s actually kinda consumer-friendly (under admittedly quite specific circumstances, though DLC is increasingly common, and this process just adds an excuse to make it more expensive). And allegedly certain NFT processes are not as energy-consuming as everyone fears.

Admittedly I don’t know how true any of this is, and I personally am still very wary of the whole thing. But it seems to me like this is where the marketplace is heading eventually, they just need to work out how.

money for things that dont exisist and worthless a gready company of course we like sound of that.

@gaga64 The problem with that train of though is that will never happen. This is the same industry that has yearly installments of games so you HAVE to rebuy DLC. This is the same industry that started a war on reselling games with $10 vouchers to be able to play online. This is the same industry that alters number values of loopholes to keep you buying.

You will never be able to buy a gun DLC in one game and take it to another. You will never be able to make a profit off of digital goods. We have never had a problem verifying DLC purchases. That's why we make accounts with our personal info and get recipts sent to our emails. This is nothing but a scam by rich people. This is why 90% of NFTs are bought and sold among a small circle of people. Its all to drive up prices and raise value.

@Zuljaras BINGO! That's also not even getting into the environmental impact NFTs have when it comes to minting and maintaining them.

Every blade of grass in my garden is a one off and therefore as rare as it gets. Who wants to open the bidding?

2nd, 3rd and 4th generation: Arcades that cheat, games you can't beat without a guide

5th and 6th generation: Expansion Packs

7th generation: DLC, Season Passes

8th generation: Microtransactions, Loot Boxes, Battle Passes

9th generation: NFTs

NFTs in videogames are only going to work when games that use them, have people who play them for love, because they actually like the game, and buy those NFT items because they want the items for themselves, not in hopes of reselling them for a bigger fool.

And if we don't get the promises like being able to use the NFTs in another game, NFTs in videogames are for the most part, just a solution to a problem that does not exist.

"We want to make sure that consumers always have a good experience every time they engage with our properties" Zelnick is such a liar but again he said that gta definitive edition had a glitch but it was patched, sure play the game now Strauss it's really not fixed. Prepare yourself next week is the announcement of GTA NFT, you can buy screenshots of gta definitive edition on the blockchain.

@gaga64 “So say I bought a physical copy of Immortals Fenyx Rising, and a bunch of DLC for it. Some time later I can then sell the cartridge AND THE DLC to someone else. Whereas previously the DLC would be stuck on my account, even if I no longer own the game, and whoever buys the cart would then have to buy the DLC themselves.
So yeah, I’m renting a parking space in that garage, and then selling my ticket to the next driver when I’m done with it. And the garage owner only gets paid once (though I bet they charge a lot more for it for that very reason).“

Except that code in a NFT can and will enforce that the original seller (Ubisoft in this example) would get a percentage, and at the same time they can produce infinite parking spaces (DLC) at no cost, thereby controlling the market value of your NFT backed goods. It's a scam.

This translates too:
"We're interested in using this scam to make money, but only if those pushing it right now survive and manage to normalise it, then we'll take advantage"

NFTs do nothing new, nothing that can't be done already but often isn't because of many reasons. The things they say they solve are largely issues they introduce...and don't actually solve. They are a stock market, a bigger fool scheme, a zero sum system and even in the newer 'proof of stake' system, a complete environmental disaster. And the people pushing them at the very top? They are some of the biggest financial criminals out there.

I'll post it again and yes it's 2 hours but even if you watch just 15 mins in you will know why to avoid NFTs and crypto:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g

As gamers, I don't know why we aren't pushing for digital copies if games to be sold as NFTs instead of useless JPEGs. For instance, Nintendo could sell NFTs of Super Mario Bros. that allow you to play it on a dedicated site for as long as you own that NFT. These NFTs could then be sold on too.

This would require some effort though, which I suppose is too much to ask for.

@Old-Red If NFT could hold a secure key-code to access a game, that would be a great use. But, the very nature of NFT is public, so that won't work. Instead, for every access, the server would have to traverse the complete history of transactions to verify ownership of the requested access privilege. It is possible, but requires expensive computation and traffic, for a product that has been paid for already. Not worth it for the publisher, when a simple subscription service could generate income instead of costing money.

@r0mer0 good to know, thanks

@SladeStrife true

@Old-Red The old Nintendo NFTs that people don't remember and yes they still works, you just need an e-Reader to get them to work.

I've heard a theory that NFTs are basically a shell game designed to avoid tax. With so many video game companies getting into them I'm starting to think that may be the case.

@Old-Red You don't need NFTs to do that and NFTs do not inherently provide that functionality. Nintendo could just build a way to resell your digital downloads into their store (which they would have to do as NFTs as well). But they don't want to do that because even if they set it up so they take a cut of the sale, they get more from a new sale.

NFTs add literally nothing new, nothing that could not already be done, most of it isn't done because it's not desirable.

I'm noticing that while the pro-NFT organisation voices are still going, the pro-NFT customer voices are getting quieter.

“We want to make sure that consumers always have a good experience every time they engage with our properties”

So are they just pretending GTA trilogy doesn’t exist now?

"Rare goods" you mean walling off content in a game you've paid for so that people can spend more money to access the worthless piece of tat

@Old-Red from my understanding the minting of these NFT's could be prohibitively expensive to do so in such large volumes. Its entire business model is low numbers but with a perceived high value and not the other way round

As someone on here once said "The more people explain about NTFS, the less I understand them." Yep.

@gaga64 "So yeah, I’m renting a parking space in that garage, and then selling my ticket to the next driver when I’m done with it."

I've seen a few people argue for this, but it doesn't make sense to me. If Rockstar can sell 155m copies of GTA5, and barely put it on a discount digitally, why would they allow, let's say, 10m people buy it then just sell it forward until all 155m have played it, AND what happens to those last 10m who end up with a copy they can't sell, but wanted to?.

Wouldn't Rockstar be in direct competition with those first round of sales to sell it to then next guy?. To the next customer, it doesn't matter if it comes from you or Rockstar. It will just depend on who is selling it cheaper, and traditionally, Rockstar haven't had to be cheap to sell units. Why would they allow you to undercut them?. Speaking of traditionally, video game companies have hated second hand sales because it eats their profits.

Unless there is some other method (artifical scarcity, ala Nintendo, on a digital and endlessly reproducible product no less) that drives those prices up. It's not like we haven't seen an object gain or keep value by being scarce (Hello 3D All Stars and PT installed on a PS4).

So just following the logic through, there's no clear financial incentive for businesses to opt in to NFTs that allow free trading on owned games, unless those games were only sold in limited quantities and only the highest bidders can get access at during launch periods (oh, hello next gen launch consoles and scalpers).

@Richnj as r0mer0 said above, it’s apparently possible for Rockstar to program the NFT so that they get a % of each resale. Not sure how that works in practice, and it wouldn’t make them the same amount as the 155m direct sales would, but it is still more than they’d get for the original physical disc being resold.

@gaga64 OK, but each one of those 155m is sales they made profit on. They aren't the disc being resold again and again.

So the questions become;

1) How would they tie a physical disc to an NFT to ensure profit on each copy resold?.

2a) Would the money they make off of NFT physical resales be more than the potential loss of earnings from digital resales? Something like 80% of game sales are digital, upending the 80% to profit from the 20% sounds stupid.

2b) or is the % they are going to take so great that it effectively equals a new game sale (and ultimately means very low return for the customer)?.

3) Why not just only sell digital only and make direct profit off of each copy sold?. Again, it is the system that's already in place and most seem to have accepted.

Again, none of these makes sense to me. This seems like a lot of effort for very little benefit on their end. NFTs biggest money making potential is in large online game spaces that encourages lots of play. Somewhere where you could have players take part in activities that generates NFTs for you, which can then be sold on to other players. Which these players are doing to earn money, meanwhile, you as the publisher, just sits back and reaps the rewards of the game. Something like GTA Online, for instance.

NFTs is like covid. You can't seem to go a day without hearing about it.

If they want to make limited, "rare" stuff, they should just make a limited edition silver Big Smoke amiibo.

And make it exclusive to Target