I’ve always seen it as “they tried to monetize a platform before they had a platform that anyone wanted to use”
Basically, the thing was made from the start to have a bunch of ways to make money, but that didn’t actually put a lot of effort into thinking on what would make it fun it attractive to users.
This is such a great example of how capitalism warps people’s minds so that they’re no longer able to even conceive of doing an activity for the sake of enjoyment, everything has to be some sort of a hussle or a grind to them:
Nowhere has this clash been more apparent than in the efforts of crypto peddlers to promote play-to-earn games, in which players are incentivized with cryptocurrency rewards. Last year, Reddit cofounder, venture capitalist and play-to-earn evangelist Alexis Ohanian predicted that by 2027, “ninety percent of people will not play a game unless they are being valued properly for that time,” a position he restated in May of this year. “The ‘play-to-earn’ model in gaming lets players earn rewards that have real-world value just for playing,” he wrote.
The point there isn’t the specific mechanic, but the fact that people who’ve been pushing ideas like NFTs in games look at everything as some sort of a hustle. Any activity has to have some monetizing component or they don’t see value in it. So, when people like that try to make games, they fail to comprehend the core concept of what a game is leading to hilarious results the article talks about.
Yeah that is real impressive, I thought we would be years away from the realistic meta avatars becoming usable on actual hardware. I don’t really understand what’s so metaversey about this though, Apple showed off the same concept with no ties to the idea of metaverses.