@RetroGames Technically, "you don't play as the prince" in the original game, either. Its player character was a traveller who arrived in Persia as (quoting from a cutscene in the 2nd game) "a stowaway on a merchant ship", and only became prince after the events of the game.
@another_one "Also, propping up artists via a pump and dump or money laundering scheme isn't a celebratory state of affairs." — I agree completely. And, for that reason, we shouldn't let the hype around NFTs obscure the fact that there already exist several crowdfunding service-providers... a.k.a. crowdfunding "platforms" (if you insist on calling them that)... that can be used for people to pay for digital artwork on the Internet, without re-creating the secondhand market for physical artwork (and all of its associated problems, such as money laundering, along with it) in the digital sphere.
@chatsworth As for "[assuming that] the real artist would come out and say that it's a fake"... it's funny you should say that, because some Nintendo Life's own staff members have done exactly that! See the video on their official YouTube channel titled "We're Now an NFT (Against Our Will)" for details; a short summary of it, though, is that someone unaffiliated with them minted an NFT of the Nintendo Life logo.
And in the later parts of the video, they also discussed some of the same points I covered above w.r.t. why the traditional marketplace in high-priced art objects (such as paintings) isn't necessarily a 100% good thing itself... which in turn casts doubt on the unexamined assumption that attempting to recreate a digital equivalent of that would automatically lead to real-world benefits.
On a related note: the Nintendo Life staff are not the only ones who've had their work used to mint NFTs by some unaffiliated person against their wishes. One other (i.e. not involving video games) source of NFT controversy has been due to digital artist having their art used in this way, then complaining about it, and then being told by NFT evangelists things like this: "if you don't like it, then you should have minted it into an NFTs first!" (Which is a pretty obnoxious attitude to have, I'd say...) Furthermore, I've also heard about some instances where people have done this to artwork whose original creator had been dead for some time prior to when the NFTs in question were minted... and this latter kind of situation tends to make friends/family of the deceased artist in question very angry...
@fafonio As for "I don’t mix my hobbies with investment and economics"... I think you just pointed to a major reason why these recent announcements about from video game companies about NFTs have been getting such an overwhelmingly negative reaction from the customer-base of those companies: because, if a company were to deliberately create a Real-Money Trading marketplace for reselling in-game items (especially rare ones) using NFTs, then that basically does mix the customers' hobby with investment. (And it would still be like that even if that marketplace were to be implemented using some means other than NFTs.)
@fafonio As for "Art collecting and art auctions [having] been a thing in this world for AGES"... that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good thing, though... because that kind of secondhand market in collectable and/or high-price items gives rise to possibilities for certain kinds of bad things to happen, such as: market bubbles/crashes, pump and dump schemes, and even money laundering.
Here are some examples:
On the topic of Steam's trading card system: sometime around 3 or 4 years ago, I remember seeing some videos on YouTube that presented evidence that certain games on Steam (especially really bad low-effort asset flip ones) had been created not (primarily) as a means of making money by selling them to normal customers, but instead as a means of farming trading cards (which then might be converted into gems)... which might go along with reselling (for real money) credentials to the entire Steam user accounts containing those cards and/or gems. (And... though I've forgotten the exact details by now... I seem to remember discussion at the time mentioning the possibility that it was criminal organizations / money-laundering rings who were running this scheme.)
And as for market bubbles/crashes: in 1996, financial speculation was to blame for this kind of boom/bust situation in the market for comic books. According to the way I remember hearing it described: around that time, some used copies of very old issues of comic books — especially copies of issue #1 of titles/characters that had gone on to be extremely popular — had gone on to fetch very high prices on the secondhand market... and then, in response to that, financial speculators started buying new comic book issues in large quantities, hoping that those ones would become valuable in the future (and the comic book publishers reacted to this by offering lots of "variant cover" versions, in order to entice the speculators into buying more copies than they otherwise would)... but those anticipated high secondhand prices on 1990s-era comic books never materialized, thus leading to a market crash (which in turn led to some additional consequences such as some distributor companies & local shops going out of business).
@Coxula Speaking strictly for me, I actually do prefer digital downloads over physical media as a distribution method... especially DRM-free downloads that can be backed up locally (e.g. using removable media such as BD-RE discs or SD cards). And some businesses actually do offer DRM-free downloads as a distribution method for paid content; e.g. for video games, there's GOG, and also Itch.io; whereas for music, there's Bandcamp, Qobuz, 7digital, Ototoy, HDtracks, ProStudioMasters, Amazon Digital Music, iTunes, and also I've seen a few record labels that offer paid digital downloads from their own websites.
On a related note: I suppose that a video game publisher could potentially sell "secondhand-resellable digital games" by using NFTs that are somehow tied to a copy-protection/DRM mechanism. However, I doubt that any of these major/semi-major game publishers that have been talking about NFTs recently would even seriously consider doing that... because, historically, it seems like they've tended to be hostile to the secondhand market and/or the rental market in physical cartridges/discs, because they see it as a loss of potential sales of new copies. (E.g. see Nintendo's attempts to have video game rentals outlawed in the 1990s in the U.S., as well as the industry's successful attempt to outlaw all software rentals in Japan.)
(One more thing about publishers' hostility to the rental market: if I remember/understand correctly, the Famicom Disk System was in part meant to be a more IP-owner-friendly alternative to the rental market... i.e. whenever the customer would take their diskette to a kiosk & pay to have a game written onto it, Nintendo and/or the game's publisher would presumably get some (or all?) of the money... though admittedly I don't know offhand the exact details of how that business model worked back then...)
(reason for edit: added 1 more digital-music-download store to the list)
@chatsworth NFTs aren't the only means for digital artists to monetize their artwork, though. Other options include:
services that support a "monthly subscription" monetization model such as Patreon, Pixiv Fanbox, and Liberapay;
services that support a "pay as you go" monetization model such as Gumroad and DeviantArt (specifically the "Premium Content" feature of the latter one);
and even old-school crowdfunding services such as Kickstarter.
And while some might consider the "secondhand market" to be a benefit of NFTs, others might consider it to be a downside rather than a benefit... e.g. because of the possibilities for market market bubbles (i.e. boom/crash cycles) and/or "greater fool" scams / pump-and-dump schemes to occur. Or, alternately, maybe the aforementioned "monthly subscription" monetization model might end up being financially more beneficial to an artist (because it tends to provide a more stable/predictable flow of income)?
(And also the energy consumption / environmental impact issues with "proof of work"-based blockchain technologies such as Ethereum to be another disadvantage of NFT marketplaces in comparison to the aforementioned other monetization options.)
@Sabrewing That's correct; according to Wikipedia, "Family Trainer" was actually the Japanese name for the Power Pad itself. (And, it was marketed by Bandai in Japan, rather than by Nintendo.)
And, as for why Stadium Events might have mentioned "Family Trainer" somewhere on its packaging: Bandai published that game — which was originally titled "Running Stadium" in Japan — under the name "Stadium Events" in Europe and also briefly in North America (just 1987 through 1988, according to Wikipedia) under that name, alongside their floor-mat peripheral... which they marketed under the name "Family Fun Fitness" in those regions. But shortly afterwards, Nintendo licensed both the peripheral and that game to publish them themselves in the North American region, and rebranded them with the new names "Power Pad" and "World Class Track Meet" (respectively) in that region. This is the reason why the Bandai-published/pre-rebranding North American version of "Stadium Events" is one of the rarest NES cartridges.
Comments 8
Re: Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown Will Apparently Run At 60FPS On Switch
@RetroGames Technically, "you don't play as the prince" in the original game, either. Its player character was a traveller who arrived in Persia as (quoting from a cutscene in the 2nd game) "a stowaway on a merchant ship", and only became prince after the events of the game.
Re: Team17's Development Partners Aren't Happy About The Publisher's NFT Plans
@another_one "Also, propping up artists via a pump and dump or money laundering scheme isn't a celebratory state of affairs." — I agree completely. And, for that reason, we shouldn't let the hype around NFTs obscure the fact that there already exist several crowdfunding service-providers... a.k.a. crowdfunding "platforms" (if you insist on calling them that)... that can be used for people to pay for digital artwork on the Internet, without re-creating the secondhand market for physical artwork (and all of its associated problems, such as money laundering, along with it) in the digital sphere.
Re: Team17's Development Partners Aren't Happy About The Publisher's NFT Plans
@chatsworth As for "[assuming that] the real artist would come out and say that it's a fake"... it's funny you should say that, because some Nintendo Life's own staff members have done exactly that! See the video on their official YouTube channel titled "We're Now an NFT (Against Our Will)" for details; a short summary of it, though, is that someone unaffiliated with them minted an NFT of the Nintendo Life logo.
And in the later parts of the video, they also discussed some of the same points I covered above w.r.t. why the traditional marketplace in high-priced art objects (such as paintings) isn't necessarily a 100% good thing itself... which in turn casts doubt on the unexamined assumption that attempting to recreate a digital equivalent of that would automatically lead to real-world benefits.
On a related note: the Nintendo Life staff are not the only ones who've had their work used to mint NFTs by some unaffiliated person against their wishes. One other (i.e. not involving video games) source of NFT controversy has been due to digital artist having their art used in this way, then complaining about it, and then being told by NFT evangelists things like this: "if you don't like it, then you should have minted it into an NFTs first!" (Which is a pretty obnoxious attitude to have, I'd say...) Furthermore, I've also heard about some instances where people have done this to artwork whose original creator had been dead for some time prior to when the NFTs in question were minted... and this latter kind of situation tends to make friends/family of the deceased artist in question very angry...
Re: Team17's Development Partners Aren't Happy About The Publisher's NFT Plans
@fafonio As for "I don’t mix my hobbies with investment and economics"... I think you just pointed to a major reason why these recent announcements about from video game companies about NFTs have been getting such an overwhelmingly negative reaction from the customer-base of those companies: because, if a company were to deliberately create a Real-Money Trading marketplace for reselling in-game items (especially rare ones) using NFTs, then that basically does mix the customers' hobby with investment. (And it would still be like that even if that marketplace were to be implemented using some means other than NFTs.)
Re: Team17's Development Partners Aren't Happy About The Publisher's NFT Plans
@fafonio As for "Art collecting and art auctions [having] been a thing in this world for AGES"... that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good thing, though... because that kind of secondhand market in collectable and/or high-price items gives rise to possibilities for certain kinds of bad things to happen, such as: market bubbles/crashes, pump and dump schemes, and even money laundering.
Here are some examples:
Re: Team17's Development Partners Aren't Happy About The Publisher's NFT Plans
@Coxula Speaking strictly for me, I actually do prefer digital downloads over physical media as a distribution method... especially DRM-free downloads that can be backed up locally (e.g. using removable media such as BD-RE discs or SD cards). And some businesses actually do offer DRM-free downloads as a distribution method for paid content; e.g. for video games, there's GOG, and also Itch.io; whereas for music, there's Bandcamp, Qobuz, 7digital, Ototoy, HDtracks, ProStudioMasters, Amazon Digital Music, iTunes, and also I've seen a few record labels that offer paid digital downloads from their own websites.
On a related note: I suppose that a video game publisher could potentially sell "secondhand-resellable digital games" by using NFTs that are somehow tied to a copy-protection/DRM mechanism. However, I doubt that any of these major/semi-major game publishers that have been talking about NFTs recently would even seriously consider doing that... because, historically, it seems like they've tended to be hostile to the secondhand market and/or the rental market in physical cartridges/discs, because they see it as a loss of potential sales of new copies. (E.g. see Nintendo's attempts to have video game rentals outlawed in the 1990s in the U.S., as well as the industry's successful attempt to outlaw all software rentals in Japan.)
(One more thing about publishers' hostility to the rental market: if I remember/understand correctly, the Famicom Disk System was in part meant to be a more IP-owner-friendly alternative to the rental market... i.e. whenever the customer would take their diskette to a kiosk & pay to have a game written onto it, Nintendo and/or the game's publisher would presumably get some (or all?) of the money... though admittedly I don't know offhand the exact details of how that business model worked back then...)
(reason for edit: added 1 more digital-music-download store to the list)
Re: Team17's Development Partners Aren't Happy About The Publisher's NFT Plans
@chatsworth NFTs aren't the only means for digital artists to monetize their artwork, though. Other options include:
And while some might consider the "secondhand market" to be a benefit of NFTs, others might consider it to be a downside rather than a benefit... e.g. because of the possibilities for market market bubbles (i.e. boom/crash cycles) and/or "greater fool" scams / pump-and-dump schemes to occur. Or, alternately, maybe the aforementioned "monthly subscription" monetization model might end up being financially more beneficial to an artist (because it tends to provide a more stable/predictable flow of income)?
(And also the energy consumption / environmental impact issues with "proof of work"-based blockchain technologies such as Ethereum to be another disadvantage of NFT marketplaces in comparison to the aforementioned other monetization options.)
Re: Bandai Namco Brings Family Trainer For Switch To Japan This December
@Sabrewing That's correct; according to Wikipedia, "Family Trainer" was actually the Japanese name for the Power Pad itself. (And, it was marketed by Bandai in Japan, rather than by Nintendo.)
And, as for why Stadium Events might have mentioned "Family Trainer" somewhere on its packaging: Bandai published that game — which was originally titled "Running Stadium" in Japan — under the name "Stadium Events" in Europe and also briefly in North America (just 1987 through 1988, according to Wikipedia) under that name, alongside their floor-mat peripheral... which they marketed under the name "Family Fun Fitness" in those regions. But shortly afterwards, Nintendo licensed both the peripheral and that game to publish them themselves in the North American region, and rebranded them with the new names "Power Pad" and "World Class Track Meet" (respectively) in that region. This is the reason why the Bandai-published/pre-rebranding North American version of "Stadium Events" is one of the rarest NES cartridges.