I mean, how or why would they? You release something; it makes 90% of its lifetime revenue in year 1; if you continue working on it for 6 more years, you're out of business.

As for the ownership or survivability of in-game virtual goods -- I think the author is referring to Valve's hats in Team Fortress 2? -- to me it's nonsensical to complain that you don't own it outside of the game. It only has relevance in the game, and it would be silly to ask the company to develop some external service just for owning your object. The ones that have tried that kind of thing just fail and look silly. But wait! Along come NFTs, with potential permanent ownership... but gamers despise that idea, too.

Gamers are just eternally grumpy and conservative about changes and progress. (I say that as a grumpy gamer, myself.)

Permanent ownership of what? If the game servers shut down or you get banned[1] for some reason your permanent ownership is meaningless. Also how are NFTs different than the existing systems like the Steam marketplace in terms of functionality?

[1] Oh yeah, NFTs require you to have an online account for the game. I would argue my unlocks in SSBM are much more permanent than any game NFT because there's no account for Nintendo to ban that could cause me to lose access to them.

Personally I view games as art that's closer to food than a painting: ephemeral, may disappear after being consumed.

Yep, nothing to see here, no regular, ongoing support to a 20 year old game of the non-subscription variety at all. Warcraft 3 (from 2003) was similarly updated well into 2019.

Now, most regular games only get 2 or 3 years of attention.

> Along come NFTs, with potential permanent ownership... but gamers despise that idea, too.

Oh no, how dare we despise things that anyone can see will not work as advertised.

Similarly Warcraft 3 had a 5 year gap between 1.26b in 2011 and 1.27a in 2016, which was probably about when they started development for Reforged, announced in 2018.

Minecraft still gets significant updates.

> I mean, how or why would they? You release something; it makes 90% of its lifetime revenue in year 1; if you continue working on it for 6 more years, you're out of business.

I think a lot of these companies have found that it's the opposite—that games make 90% of their revenue in year 1 because nobody continues working on them. If you keep working on it, however, you can continue to get sales, because the more you work on it, the better the game becomes, and so people buy it just to see what everyone else is talking about.

Ubisoft has announced NFT integration via their own platform. However, unlike an actual "I can do what I want with this" token, it may as well be a database entry in the company network: https://quartz.ubisoft.com/welcome/

I don't think there's any way to 'solve' NFTs in games right now: A true NFT can be moved anywhere on an open network (monkey jpeg receipts, etc), but a game-related NFT needs to be constrained to those users who play the game, otherwise it's even more useless.

It doesn't help that most things NFT-related are scams, hype bait, etc.

They can create digital scarcity of in-game items using a centralised server. Any NFT linked to an in-game item will be just as worthless when the servers are eventually shut down. And they don't want players buying and selling items, they want to take a cut every time a player buys something.

You're never going to be taking your Fortnite skins into FIFA or your Gran Turismo cars into Mario Kart. Ain't going to happen for a multitude of reasons.

(And if one publisher/developer does something like that as a gimmick, allow importing items into a specific another game, they could do that with a centralised database too)

Agree totally. NFTs for games make quite literally no sense. You are buying an asset or whatever from a central authority (the developer/publisher) that only exists or makes any sense within their game/platform/ecosystem. What value could a token bring there? The only value add I could see is that your ability to buy and sell the asset is now out of the hands of the publisher... except it isn't since they still control access to the asset and can therefor constrain your use of it in any way they see fit.

This is really a problem with most of the NFT related ideas floating around. Once a central authority is involved your token ceases being meaningful and just becomes, like you said, an ID in a database somewhere.

Plenty of games get regular patches and updates (Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition being one I recently played) and back in the day, games would release paid expansions. No reason that Rocket League couldn't sell a map pack, for example. Sure, its a similar idea as freemium (pay for more content), but at least the expansions used to be sizable packs with lots of content. Old school expansions, as well as expansions like those of The Witcher 3 or the FROM Software games (which are often lauded as better than the base game), that cost about 1/4 the price of the base game for a decent content boost extend the life of the game, provide the developer with continued income and feel a lot less scammy than fremium games do.

Now: Pay for game prior to its release, launch day, people will tell you the bugs are actually features, studio milks franchise forever.

There's a lot of games that have a sort of boring standard (SC2's 1v1 ladder maps are all same-y, nobody competitive plays Smash with items on, etc.) and the fact that you see this pop up repeatedly in unrelated communities should probably tell you something.

IMO, when you have a game with sufficiently deep mechanics, wackiness tends to obscure that depth, resulting in an experience that's less interesting rather than more. Like if you added Mario Kart abilities to football/soccer and suddenly the winning team was getting regularly blue shelled, I don't think it would improve the experience, even if initially it'd be hilarious.

Now maybe it's still worth it to have "party game" modes in some cases, I'm just saying that these modes might not have legs, so to speak, and thus may not be worth the dev effort if hardly anyone plays them.

Anyway that's why I also used SC2 as an example. Blizzard's attempts to add more wackiness/variety to the 1v1 ladder maps have generally been poorly received.

Now, SC2's co-op mode has a bunch of wackiness and did great, but note that this is very VERY separate from standard ladder/melee games. It's not just "oh we changed a few rules" or "we took the base game and added wacky items" it's a much more fundamental rework than that, it's an entirely new 'vertical' for the game. And yeah, that kind of thing could probably work for a game like Rocket League.

If your primary audience is casual, like in the case of Nintendo games, then it makes all the sense in the world.

Obviously you could argue that Psyonix ought to be appealing to a casual audience. That's a separate conversation, and I'd argue that RL is a fundamentally bad fit for that sort of game, but given what they have been going for thus far, not introducing crazier modes makes a lot of sense.

The complication when it comes to adding new features is that Rocket League is built on top of a bespoke scripting engine that was discontinued after Unreal Engine 3, so they have to fully recreate RL in UE5. Because of this they don't want to put any additional resources into new features for UE3 since it's wasted effort once the game transitions to the new engine.

I did like that game mode where the ball would gravitate towards the goal!

The only genuinely new one they've done for years was the NFL mode, which they presumably got paid for and wasn't very good.

They do that pretty regularly. Not in major ways, but the rules of football do change over time.

I personally am glad the developers have realized they have a game like this and haven’t killed their game through adding more for the sake of more.

They tried. Wasteland, Neo Tokyo, and Starbase ARC were non-standard maps. Players complained about it, and now they are changed to be standard.

They tried that with the original wasteland map and there was huge pushback from the community and people demanded the maps be standardized.

They still keep adding other game modes some of which are only there for a few days.