First of all, whatever items you find or buy in game are still bound to the game and once that shuts down or loses players, everything you own becomes worthless as there are no buyers any more.
Second, paying 100s to 1000s of dollars for an item is worse than buying some gems for $5.
Finally, I am doing neither. To me arguing about which is better is like arguing whether kidnapping or bank robbery is better, neither is any good.
the rich can waste some $ on the items and wait for them to become more valuable, then sell them. With your mechanisms items should become rarer and more expensive in resales, driving up prices over time (assuming the demand stays constant)
Heck, with getting a percentage from every resale, I could buy every item in the marketplace and sell it again for the same price and get rich on the resales alone. Kinda like a pyramid scheme.
Also, the rich fund the game and make money that way, why bother playing it, that is a losing proposition unless you get out early enough.
I can somewhat understand if this was in a F2P game (i still wouldn’t like it because of the crazy economy), but in a game that already asks for money upfront, i think any kind of real money economy is disgusting.
Whole thread should probably be moved to off topics 
Everyone seems to be misunderstanding or purposefully ignoring the following:
I am not suggesting that Grim Dawn or Grim Dawn 2 use NFTs or an NFT marketplace, I am suggesting we use the assets and engine of Grim Dawn to create an entirely separate game.
Nobody would be forced to play this game, so you don’t have to rant about how much you hate real-world economies in video games; and it would obviously be f2p.
Well then, I think everyone can stop worrying - I feel pretty good about the odds of Crate doing a F2P being close to zero. Doesn’t strike me as something that medierra, or most anyone at Crate, would be interested in doing.
Maybe I’m wrong but I certainly don’t think I am. Plus I gotta be honest gamifying GD with NFT is way too controversial - they’ll receive way more negative backlash THAN good from pursuing such a move.
Considering that Crate has spent years building up a pretty loyal and committed playerbase I simply cannot imagine that they would find this idea even remotely enticing. medierra has way more common sense than to entertain demolishing years of goodwill over NFT. Or so I certainly believe.
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Also, of note, is that you seem to think Crate is purely motivated by money (you have made it clear above you are appealing to their possible “greed” above). Thankfully, medierra has long ago cleared the air on how much money he needs:
So, as you can see, he’s content with his success. And as a fan of Crate I’m particularly content that he presented himself in that light.
this reminds me of what happened to torchlight series. 1st game is a fun offline single player sandbox arpg with good modding capabilities, then runic starts thinking the 2nd game would be a good mmorpg candidate. they were wrong, and they tried damage control to make the 2nd game similar to the 1st in its single player oriented design with good modding capabilities too.
then the free2play disaster happerned torchlight mobile and torchlight frontier. runic disbanded and echtra got whats left of the mess to make torchlight 3. and even then they seem to finally give up and left it to perfect world (the one who tried to push torchlight dev again and again to go the monetized mmorpg path).
meanwhile grim dawn and its spiritual predecessor titan quest are still doing fine these days. they’re not as big as diablo/PoE but they know their gamer’s niche and respects it throughout the years.
if crate’s gonna go the nft route though, perhaps doing it on a spinoff game rather than the main series would be a better. because many players imo would expect grim dawn 2 to be single player oriented like the 1st one. people generally don’t like it when sequels drastically change the fundamental genre/niche of a main series.
I ain’t buying that. I’m old enough to remember:
The MMO bloom and how they became the end points of some of the better franchises. Very good timing, because Bethesda had just announced Skyrim Anniversary Edition. 10 years passed, still no TESVI. Ty TES Online. Same could be said about several other franchises. Once a studio acquired a MMO cash cow they focused on it and cut expenses and effort elsewhere. Back then we’ve been thinking that having a cash cow is good because it’ll allow studios to expand and make a lot of other games, but in hindsight it was a stupidly idealistic thinking.
The bloom of mobile gaming, and it’s degenerate pay to progress concept. Initially they were more or less separate from “serious” PC&console gaming so I didn’t care what’s happening over there, not after “don’t you have phones” incident. Now it’s obvious that mobile gaming marked had sucked plenty of resources from “serious” gaming.
The shift from pay to play model to free to play model + cosmetic shop, then to pay to play + cosmetic shop, then pay to play + lootboxes. Yet again it was something I didn’t care about at first because cosmetics used to be completely optional, sometimes not even good. But then I tried one very popular game that obviously needed an update to it’s basic item design, and looking at it’s cosmetic shop I understood that it’s just not gonna happen.
The shift from large expansions to DLC to large expansions + DLC. You want a version with full content? Cool, it’ll cost you 150-200$+ with bundle discount once game’s life cycle is over. If you’re actually playing the game and following it’s every DLC release prepare to spend twice as much. Moreover, studios are incentivised to split what could had been a reasonable single expansion into many small pieces because they can then sell it as a standalone “optional” DLC, also incentivised to release half baked products because “they know it’ll become better with expansions so they’ll swallow that”.
The pattern should be obvious by now. So let’s not pretend that NFT for gaming business won’t affect us and we don’t have to rant about how we hate real-world economies in video games. I don’t question that studios and publishers who jump on that bandwagon first have chances of benefitting greatly from that, but for gaming it would be a negative trend beyond reasonable doubt.
If something can be done it will be done. Given your summary I expect NFT games to take their share of the gaming market.
With that said I do not see how video games benefit of NFTs. I’d rather expect these games being designed around the play-to-earn formula to the detriment of the gameplay.
If you want to try pitch something like this whether it uses Grim Dawn’s assets or not, you would be better off asking the Path of Exile community. There’s a gold mine of people that spend way too much money there.
no, both points were a given, and just because I can choose to not play the game does not mean I am not allowed to share my opinion on it
1.) Yes, you’re right. But if we’re going to start pointing out idealistic thinking, it’s also idealistic to think that for-profit companies are going to knowingly design a game using a business model that makes them significantly less money. I’m as big a fan of offline RPGs as anyone here in this thread, as a gamer I’m also unhappy with where video games are headed. But I don’t think we can stop it, and I think this thread has been an echo chamber of some very passionate people who are too idealistic in thinking that things won’t or shouldn’t change. I stalwartly disagree that an economy wherein players own their equipment is worse than one where the publisher sells you items, bonuses, cosmetics, gacchas (gambling) and other things. You can argue you don’t like either, but I’m arguing they’re inevitably going to take over, and publishers that don’t convert are going to miss out financially and not have the means to keep up with their competitors over time.
2.) Yep
3.) Yep
4.) Yep
5.) Your final paragraph I agree with. It will inevitably affect you all, but you don’t have to play it. Though our options will continue to dwindle. You can choose to support the least shitty of the options available, which in my mind is a free to play game with a real world economy or games with excessive amounts of paid DLC content. I’d much prefer the F2P game with a real world economy and never ending developer support and content updates.
I disagree that they’ll receive more negative backlash than positivity. It’s more likely that they’ll inherit a massive new player base that is interested in this idea because the demand for gaming+NFTs is insanely high. The current community would likely be dwarfed by the old community, which obviously the folk in this forum don’t want. Let’s be honest, if you’re here in this forum talking about this stuff, you’re not the average person–you love this game and you love this community. But what is best for Crate Entertainment might not be what you want; or what the owner wants, even.
It’s interesting to me that your take away from all of the above reasons to pursue this model is “greed”. Rich Dad, Poor Dad is a great book, I encourage you to read it.
I’m not sure if you got it yet, but like 90% of GD’s playerbase is the exact opposite of the target audience you want.
90% of Grim Dawn’s player base is 6,000 people in total.
The target audience is not Grim Dawn’s current player base, and is much larger than 6,000 people.
All of crypto has its eyes on play-to-earn NFT models right now. Millions of people.
Considering that your entire premise was to entice them with all the immense wealth they were going to receive if they would only just adopt your idea, then yes, I’d say you are attempting to motivate via greed.
Yes, it will be done. And there is a world where Crate continues to make the games that it’s passionate about and also publishes different styles of games (play to earn) at the same time. This is not an ultimatum, it’s just an amazing opportunity to take existing content and turning it into something globally recognized. Crate could be the leader in this sector.
Then once again, I have to question: why are you here, discussing this with us, if virtually nobody on this forum is interested because many of us play games in the ARPG genre for fun rather than for monetary profit.
It isn’t “greedy” to be motivated by money, generate profit, or run a business efficiently, etc. Greed is immoral and negative. If someone says “this job will make you a lot of money”, you aren’t a greedy person for wanting to take the job.
You may have some unhealthy biases towards money. Money is just a tool to shape your reality. If you feel negative emotions when people talk about doing things for the sake of making a lot of money, and those things aren’t innately immoral, then I recommend reading the book.
I’ll pass. The whole idea and treatment you are envisioning for item handling is just bad. And yes, it’s entirely based on greed and getting rich… The entire “replacement community” you are imagining, I think it’s safe to say they would be filled with profit seekers and the “game” would degenerate into haves and have nots.
No thanks. But like I said, I am in no way worried about Crate going down your road. It’s not going to happen so this whole thread is pointless.