Dr. Disrespect’s Crypto Dream Game sounds like a nightmare
This weekend we dove back into the 2021 crypto/NFT/web3 debate thanks to streamer Dr. Disrespect who ponders how much fun it would be to extract blockchain items from games with $100K real money price tags:
This is not idle chatter, because Doc is actually developing his own extraction shooter, Deaddrop, which has already used NFTs as founder “access passes” for early parts of the games. This new idea of valuable item loot mining hasn’t been confirmed as integrated into the game, and it seems a bit beyond what Doc has previously said about NFTs:
“It doesn’t change your experience of the game once it’s released and it will continue to be free to play. You can’t buy yourself to win,” Doc said when Deaddrop revealed it would have web3 blockchain elements earlier. He said it would not be a “get-rich-quick” or “money” scheme.
It’s a pretty bizarre take on 2023 here, given that every major video game developer has shied away from the concept of NFTs in games, even those who were previously cheerleaders for it. Ubisoft has been quietly throttling their NFT department after being mocked for their attempt. Square Enix’s web3 cheerleading president is leaving the company. But here we have Dr. Disrespect parroting almost exact talking points from the height of NFT mania back in early 2021:
Countless developers have talked about the unsustainability of the concept of a blockchain item that can be used across multiple games, while others have pointed out that the idea of owning an item in one game that unlocks some functionality later doesn’t actually need the blockchain at all . to achieve this.
As for Doc’s $100,000 extraction item idea, it makes very little sense in practice when you actually try to logic out how this would work in a live game. Sure, I can see how watching a player race to retrieve such a valuable, rare item could make for an entertaining streaming spectacle. Although perhaps no more interesting than a high-profile esports tournament with hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on the line. This sounds like the daydream of a mega-rich, very bored content creator.
How would this work in practice? An item worth $100,000 would be so rare that almost no live player would ever see it. And if you suddenly have a game where loot has an actual value attached to it like that, that would be an absolute, unsustainable hotbed for widespread cheating that would be too difficult to effectively police. Cheats already plague most multiplayer shooters when nothing is at stake. Now imagine if you instead kill an opponent and take his stuff, giving you thousands or tens of thousands of actual dollars. How far will cheaters go to secure the stolen goods?
Dead drop
Midnight party
Game designers have also pushed back on the idea of this kind of ultra-rare loot in the first place, as it just wouldn’t be worth the development time with so few players getting to experience it. Plus there’s the fundamental problem with designing a game around trying to cash out through in-game items, because even if Doc can see that as “entertainment” it completely changes the nature of the game. All we have to do is look at a “successful” NFT game like Axie Infinity to see what a mindless stroke it was, one that ultimately saw the economy collapse. Now we have a new Bored Ape game, “Dookie Dash,” where players try to grow “Sewer Keys” worth millions. But of course the game, as an actual video game, is complete garbage.
Dr. Disrespect’s views on crypto and NFTs continue to be far outside the mainstream of the video game industry, which ran with the concept for two years until the gaming population effectively ran NFTs out of town. Now it’s just…Dookie Dash.
It remains to be seen how many of Doc’s NFT ideas make it to Deaddrop, which right now just looks and plays like a fairly standard extraction shooter, and its web3 functionality remains limited to its founders’ “variant” profile pictures. But who knows when he starts dropping these $100K loots. Or how he plans to make them worth $100K in the first place.
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