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In a conversation with Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum and creator of Solidity, Edward Snowden expressed his concerns over the artificial scarcity of NFTs in the gaming environment.
The famous whistleblower has been calling out shady, potentially shady, and unethical practices in the industry for a long time. And being a huge advocate of a decentralized tech world, it's worth noticing what Snowden is saying.
Basically, with the huge success of NFTs in the past 6-8 months, a lot of options are rising as the next big thing in the space. Metaverse and Play-to-earn games are a couple of them.
Snowden's statement is centered on the P2E model that merges the Metaverse and NFT with gaming. He said, "I think the community should very much be trying to bend the arc of development away from injecting artificial, unnecessary scarcity entirely for the benefit of some investor class."
Meaning — a lot of games that surfaced in recent history are blatantly trying to grab some quick cash off of the new trend without actually having anything meaningful to deliver.
It's important to mention that Snowden's remarks are specifically targeted at NFTs used in games, not NFT as a whole. He himself sold his NFT Stay Free for a whopping 2224 ETH ($9m+) earlier this year.
As much as I would like to disagree with Snowy here, he has got a point.
“We have people that are trying to [inject] an artificial sense of scarcity into a post-scarcity domain."
But that doesn't mean integration of the P2E model in the gaming universe is an evil thing, it's actually the opposite. In the past decade, gaming has transformed from a source of entertainment to a source of income. And it'll continue to grow with the introduction of NFTs and Metaverse.
The problem is with games that are using P2E for the sake of a quick money grab.
However, this doesn't discredit the work that has been going on in the NFT space. Tons of legit and groundbreaking projects like Axie, Sandbox, and Continuum are actually creating a place for gamers to have ownership of their achievements inside the games.
As the collective consciousness of the society increases around NFT and the whole web3 era, these types of ad hoc opportunistic projects will be spotted more easily.