Power to the Players. Screw the creators.

August 8, 2022 4:22 AM

It's been nearly a month since the launch of GameStop's NFT marketplace. While some sources are calling it a success and "an early hit among JPEG collectors" others are saying it "is in the odd position of being a relatively major player in a rapidly shrinking market." Either way it should come as a shock to precisely nobody that in its first week—and despite requiring an application process to mint/sell NFTs—a Creator* was stealing the work of indie game devs and profiting from it.

*Creator on the Marketplace. Not to be confused with the creators of the games who actually, y'know, created things. Like Krystian Majewski, AKA Krystman, AKA Lazy Devs Academy whose Breakout clone, made as part of an extensive tutorial on PICO-8 development, was stolen for the NiFTy Arcade collection.

posted by Mister_Sleight_of_Hand (12 comments total)

I worked with a guy at a well regarded consulting firm that definitely was smart, knew what he was talking about but everytime he had to do something beyond pontificate he had some medical problem preventing him from doing it. He couldn't use AWS VDIs because he had vision problems, then when that was fixed he had some problem with his hands. I was going through some health issues myself so I had sympathy and never questioned it, but he was eventually let go.

After we both parted ways with the consulting firm he had an incredibly sketchy way of making money he wanted me in on. It was some freelance site where you post your resume and you basically have to spam a bunch of people with rates that were a race to the bottom. I protested, these rates were 1/4 my usual rate and I didn't have time to sit there and respond to 100 requests for like 20 hour Wordpress sites at offshore prices. Ah, but here's the catch. He wanted to use my resume then use offshore help to respond to 500+ ads a day then use offshore labor to complete the work. I'd have to sign the contract and talk to clients only on the telephone. Oh and this sort of game was expressly forbidden by the site. Furthermore because they blacklisted international IP addresses, he wanted me to run a VPN using my Internet so they could respond to the ads using my IP address. He sent me the cheapest little media center box PC he could find that didn't even have a legal copy of Windows and had instructions on how to set it up so these offshore types could use my IP address, and use my resume to get work. I declined obviously.

Fast forward a year or so and he's really excited about the new job he has as... an executive at GameStop. I think he was a bit sore that I looked down upon his earlier scheme and was trying to impress me with how he was working on GameStop's new crypto division or something. Something about meta, Web3, earning money in game to spend at GameStop and another thing about NFTs I didn't quite understand. I stopped talking about it and forgot about him. He had that mentality where I don't think he really thought he was scamming the system but that's how the "elite" worked.

I don't wish him ill but I'm kind of smiling that it didn't work out well, I might have to text him to see his take on it and how it is still a great idea but someone else screwed it up.
posted by geoff. at 4:34 AM on August 8, 2022 [27 favorites]

Interesting - I have another experience similar to geoff's - but this guy was a solid technical guy, worked his way up to executive level at an IT MSP company (from a big-name tech company, then a solid tech consultancy), and then left that a year ago to start a crypto NFT thing. Seems to be working for him, but all I can think of is... "NFT = Money Laundering"...
posted by rozcakj at 5:48 AM on August 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

zep, the developer of Pico-8, has been trying to get this taken down, though coming up against a wall of cryptobro chutzpah.
posted by acb at 6:12 AM on August 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

I've seen a couple people with open-source projects trying to add "no NFTs" restrictions to their license. Similar to how some people would say theirs can't be used for military applications.

Though I have heard conflicting opinions on how well that works legally.
posted by RobotHero at 6:54 AM on August 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

Putting a "no NFTs" clause in your license works exactly as well as how much money you're willing to spend on enforcing it. Which is pretty much why I haven't released my robot designs as open source. Because I have no money to prevent the crypto assholes from using them, because terms of a license don't mean shit to people like that.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:10 AM on August 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

adding restrictions is a classic problem of open source: the advocates are so focused on the "freedom to" that they've never considered the necessity of requiring "freedom from" clauses
posted by scruss at 7:13 AM on August 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

GameStop sold the "falling man" image as NFT.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 8:31 AM on August 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

This is the first social phenomenon in my lifetime where I have had such a strong "but... it's a pet rock?" feeling. It's really hard to get into the mindset that leads to this, but, from the outside, based on what you can see on Reddit, it looks something like a mass group therapy session, or maybe even some kind of religious gathering. It's a group of people, many of whom have staked their life savings and then some on this idea, who collectively enforce a veneer of supportive civility. It reminds me of startup circles in this way. The thing is, the knives always come out in tough times. To me, this marketplace idea is a desperate attempt to capitalize on a flash in the pan circumstance of the original meme-ing of the stock, to the true believers, it's a solid business plan. Where I see no real innovation, no moat, and no path to profitability that doesn't involve riding another bubble, they see a worry free retirement, flush with profits won on the basis of a technicality. As with any good scam, there is probably truth to the assertions that there are a lot of shady things going on in the market, but any voice who might mediate the excitement and offer a different opinion is ignored or shouted down. Really hard to see this ending well, but it's possible it could drag out long enough to at least not end in a single dramatic reckoning of some kind, say a quarterly report that shows minimal cashflow related to the marketplace...
posted by feloniousmonk at 9:53 AM on August 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

Yeah, at least with Beanie Babies you got a plush toy.
posted by biogeo at 11:28 AM on August 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

> Putting a "no NFTs" clause in your license works exactly as well as how much money you're willing to spend on enforcing it.

What if the license includes clauses that you can produce NFTs, but you owe the author 95% of all revenue (not profit!) from the sale of them plus a base licensing fee of $5000, and in the case of dispute you agree to cover all legal fees plus the author's time litigating it?
posted by madhadron at 2:24 PM on August 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Seems to me they've repeated their own stated history of missing out on video game downloads but, this time, the window their product needed to be developed and launched in was merely weeks or maybe months at most and they've missed it. It's hard to see how NFTs can survive as a product with any credibility at all for much longer, given it's really just an online game and whoever holds the money when the music stops is the winner.
posted by dg at 6:28 PM on August 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Depending on whether one has a supply of fresh greater fools who can be persuaded that the music has only paused, and if you bUy TeH DiP now, it'll go to the moon and you'll be richer than Elon Musk, but hurry.
posted by acb at 6:36 AM on August 11, 2022