Why gamers hate crypto, and music fans don't

most gamified fan engagement apps usually end up tethering fan behaviors to a granular, homogenous points and leveling system — such that, say you can only become a “true fan” of an artist on a certain app if you like 10 of their tweets or stream their song 100 times on Spotify. It’s a top-down approach to an inherently bottom-up, emergent behavior... See more

Today let’s talk about a fault line that’s beginning to open up in the gaming world, but I suspect will soon be coming to most platforms and app stores. It’s a divide that begins with a simple question: will your platform allow NFTs? Crypto payments? You know … blockchain stuff?

The questions are coming to gaming first, but it’s easy to imagine them cropping up elsewhere in the new economy. And when they do, platforms will be faced with a choice: shut it all down, as Steam did, and bet that the whole crypto craze will some day fall into the ocean; or be curious about it, the way Epic is, and see if there’s a way to channel... See more

As the space becomes increasingly saturated, nuanced takes on the state of crypto gaming are few and far between ranging from “everything is a Ponzi scheme” to “Crypto gaming will fundamentally change every aspect of work, life, and play forever.”

That’s a lot of buzzwords in one place, and meanwhile games people, like art people, don’t necessarily see any problem in their world that NFTs solve.

If a game’s marketing and distribution strategy centres around crypto exchanges, token launch platforms and guilds, they are not targeting traditional gamers despite their spoken desire to.

But as much as crypto fans want to believe they’ve created something startling and revolutionary, in reality, the experience feels: unfamiliar (payments happen off-platform), overwhelming (you end up in a confusing maze of wallets - jumping from Coinbase to Metamask to Uniswap, often unclear what you own), and pyramid scheme-y.