The image is on the micro-blogging site.
Four months after announcing that it was exploring the idea, it began allowing some people to use non-fungible token as their profile pictures. Subscribers to the service can now show their NFTs in their profile. These users are easily distinguished from the others by the shape of their avatars: a hexagonal one.
I suggested that the company's adoption of NFTs could take the technology mainstream when they first broached the idea. I argued that owners of popular collections had invented the NFT profile because they used profile pictures to display it. It is an official product of the social networking site.
The introduction of NFT profiles was met with a lot of disdain. The technology does not live up to its promises of decentralizing power or even verification of ownership, according to recent criticism. NFTs don't usually use the owned media on the blockchain, but what they do is a receipt for it. It is possible that a technology that can leave people open to theft, scam, and other dangers could be legitimizing.
Millions of people are about to start seeing those hexagons and wonder what the fuss is about. The question is whether the platforms that are racing to build NFT integrations can brute-force digital collectibles into popularity over the strident objections of critics.
We had an early test of that question in the gaming industry. Several top developers have recently announced plans to integrate NFTs into their games in the form of digital goods. The phrase "massive backlash" is included in the stories.
There are no complicated complaints from the gaming community. The gaming industry used to charge you a one-time fee to own a game, but now you can pay for it multiple times via subscriptions or downloads. The introduction of loot boxes, which award players items at random, introduced an expensive and much-hated form of pseudo-gambling into the gaming world. The games feel more fun when they feel more nickel-and-dimed by developers.
It is not clear how that would make games more fun, either, as the idea that playing a video game in the future might involve connecting a wallet, paying steep fees to transact on the marketplace, purchasing scarce digital goods, and then working to protect them from thieves is not clear. In his weekly round-up of games news, the game critic SkillUp has a recurring feature about NFTs.
The plan to put NFTs into Ghost Recon Breakpoint was roasted by the public. Square Enix, maker of the Final Fantasy series and others, drew criticism for suggesting that it could potentially offercryptocurrencies in the future. Mobile gaming company Zynga seems to have avoided a lot of backlash, but then they built their games on asking players to make constant, frustrating transactions from the start.
The metaverse conversation will be shaped by this fight.
This backlash is more than a series of negative public relations cycles for would-be operators of thriving NFT trading platforms. The next version of the internet will depend on video games as the thing that will lure the people to buy virtual and augmented reality headsets. The basic idea is that you will buy virtual clothes or other digital goods as NFTs, and take them from a virtual reality experience to a virtual reality experience, starting with games.
The metaverse will look very different if players continue to hate NFTs. The team behind Axie Infinity will suffer because they raised funds at sky-high valuations based on the idea that games will bring billions of people onto web3.
Players are not the only ones who are skeptical. 70 percent of studios said they have no interest in NFTs, according to a survey published today by the Game Developers Conference. Jay Peters is at The Verge.
The survey said that a few people thought it was the future of gaming. A vast majority of respondents spoke out against both practices, noting their potential for scam, overall monetization concerns, and the environmental impact.
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Quotes from developers were very negative. One wrote, "How this hasn't been identified as a pyramid scheme is beyond me." One person said that they would rather not endorse burning a rainforest down to confirm someone has a jpeg. They should be burned to the ground. Everyone involved in them should be banned. I am quitting my job at an NFT company to get away from it.
One way to read this data is that almost one-third of game developers are interested in NFT integrations. They are in the minority.
The question of how these dynamics will play out on social media is still being asked. Buying and displaying digital art that you purchase will be optional, and there are some important differences between games and social media. While the audience for video games numbers in the billions and defies easy categorization, I think the diverse audience on the platform may have a different reaction to NFTs in the timeline.
People are dunking on people who are mad at hexagons.
I saw reactions from people who were against thecryptocurrencies, and from people who were in favor of thecryptocurrencies.
Who will win?
Sometimes a technology is so hated that it is driven out of polite society. Ask anyone who wore Glass in a bar how it went.
Things get ridiculed into legitimate popularity on social media. The way jokes are used to smuggle ideas into the mainstream is called irony poisoning. Cryptocurrencies have been used to create badges of honor. The community quickly began using the term "JPEGs" to refer to their collections when critics derided their art works.
It won't be the last to try and take NFTs mainstream. The Financial Times reported on Thursday that Meta will allow people to sell and create NFTs. YouTube will fit into the plans of the company, as it now has aBlockchain team as well.
It is too early to gauge the prospects of any of these efforts. We might look back on the day NFTs became accessible to a broad, mainstream audience.
We are waiting to see if the mainstream actually wants them.
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