philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Stop Trying to Sell Gamers What They Don’t Want

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Every year, the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco has a main floor filled with every manner of game development tools and platforms. Among these are inevitably Web3 companies trying to explain to an audience of completely uninterested Web2 developers how easy it is to tokenize in-game items and how many transactions per second their layer 2 scaling solution has. But never once has a single of these developers heard from their communities “I really wish my magic spells were NFTs.” ...

Video game players do not care about NFTs. They don’t care about ownership of in-game assets. They don’t care about faster and cheaper blockchains. They fundamentally don’t care at all about the underlying tech stack behind the games they play. ...

Since Web3 developers care about decentralization and ownership of assets, they mistakenly believe everyone else must as well. But the average gamer doesn’t have a clue they don’t “own” the video game skins or items they have bought or received through gameplay.  ...

Then, what do gamers care about? Well, playing an enjoyable game goes without saying. Beyond that, they actually care about many of the same things that those in Web3 care about. The most important of these being community, data, and extensibility. Fortunately, these are all problems Web3 technologies are perfectly set up to solve. ...

One only needs to glance at things like esports tournaments or speed-running stats to see how important data is for players. ... Developers use analytics for in-game activity like balancing or tracking player behaviors, but also for finding what demographics and marketplaces are best for advertising and selling. ..

Finally we have extensibility, or the ability of these systems to be expanded upon. Gamers adore user-generated content. They love every aspect of it, from community tournaments to fan art, to custom maps to secondary marketplaces. ...

See the full story here: https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2024/07/10/stop-trying-to-sell-gamers-what-they-dont-want/