GameFi: Is Dr Disrespect Doing NFTs Right?
Dr Disrespect, a popular gaming YouTuber, made headlines recently after posting a tweet hyping up his upcoming NFT-based video game Deadrop. He remarked on the potential of blockchain gaming and how it could add real monetary prizes directly in-game. Unsurprisingly, he was met with harsh criticism from many web2 gamers.
Many other popular YouTubers, like Moist Critikal and Angry Joe, have expressed their thoughts on the game and why they believe the project will fail. However, it's clear that neither side seems to accurately understand the technology behind web3 gaming.
What is Deadrop?
For starters, Deadrop is a first-person extraction shooter game being developed by a team under Dr Disrespect’s lead called Midnight Society. It resembles popular battle royales like Player Ultimate: Battlegrounds and Escape from Tarkov.
What makes the game notable is its inclusion of NFT technology. The game offers unique passes and memberships through NFT tokens called The Founders Access Pass and hovers at a floor price of around .5 Eth.
Fortunately, the game is hosted on the Polygon blockchain, which will help the game scale appropriately as more users join.
Disrespect’s tweets
The controversy began when Dr Disrespect posted a tweet asking his audience to envision a game where a prize of $100,000 sat within the game arena. The concept was nothing new, Dr Disrespect’s interests caused an uproar in the web2 community that believes there is no true benefit to blockchain gaming.
Although an in-game prize worth $100,000 is an exciting prospect, it’s an egregious statement to make when taking a deeper look at the NFT market, which has struggled for nearly a year. Put simply, people aren’t interested in NFTs, and the thought that an NFT in Deadrop would be worth $100,000 for no other reason than that’s what Dr Disrespect said is arbitrary.
It comes off as another example of an overhyped product being shielded by a social media influencer. Even worse is that Dr Disrespect didn’t provide any reasoning for the $100,000 valuation. Does this item have a utility? Are there enough Dropdead players to warrant a demand that high? Is the item part of any tournament?
These are obvious questions that still need to be answered, but it appears that the NFT community is still willing to accept blind hype over detailed descriptions.
Cheating concerns
Cheating is another aspect of the game that has been brought up and criticized lately. While cheating is never intended in any game, it’s been nearly impossible to stop in almost all popular multiplayer games and there is no reason to assume that Deadrop will be any different, especially when NFTs supposedly worth $100,000 are involved.
Cheating has already become a problem in GameFi reported in an earlier article on BCCN3. The fact is, when money is brought to the table in any situation people are going to try to find ways to acquire it. Compounding the problem further is the fact that web3 is filled with bad actors, scammers, and hackers who will have no problem targeting Dropdead.
Misconceptions about web3 in gaming
However, the situation became truly ridiculous when one person countered Dr Disrespect’s tweet and asked him about the significance of web3 storage in gaming. Unfortunately, Dr Disrespect gave a less-than-ideal response saying that the blockchain would allow players to migrate items between games. This has widely been criticized as a poor benefit for web3 gaming as it disregards a lot of the technical limitations in gaming.
The fact is, using a decentralized system like a blockchain allows gamers to move their items outside of official servers where they are under the complete custody of the game developers. When an in-game asset is stored on the blockchain it is no longer subject to someone else’s control in the same way that no one can control your own bitcoin.
However, the problem with this is that not many gamers care. There isn’t a major demand among web2 gamers for custody of in-game assets whether microtransactions become more common or not.
Yet, the bigger issue is that the people creating these web3 games don’t know this and are providing explanations that are ignorant of the technology that they are supposedly interested in. If web3 gaming is to be successful, it needs to be led by developers that understand the technology because it won’t be implemented correctly by people that don’t.
