MoonSong
Rules-lawyering drama queen but not a munchkin
IMO, it must be closed with three locks, drop the keys, wall it up, pour reinforced concrete over it, bury it and build a mosque on top just to be safe...
D&D 5E The Glimmering - NFT Heroes in a Blockchain Campaign?
- Thread starter Retreater
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humble minion
Legend
I'm actually a bit surprised these guys are still around. They got a ... not very enthusiastic reception when they first showed up here, which probably wasn't helped by the fact that their pitch was 'we have blockchain!' rather than 'our game world is cool and interesting because...' How have they stayed alive all this time? They're still not selling much of an actual product, and their overheads would be massively greater than a normal game publisher. I would have thought the (extremely predictable) collapse of the NFT market would have cut off their sources of capital, but i dunno, maybe the chief investor is a True Believer or perhaps this is their last gasp, all-in attempt to generate some hype before the money runs out and the receivers start flogging their office furniture on eBay.
I think the crypto incursion into the TTRPG space has largely collapsed under the weight of its own horsecrap at this point. I certainly haven't heard much recently about, for instance, Kickstarter's attempt to 'go on the blockchain,' and I strongly suspect it's either been quietly wound up as a big embarrassing failure, or else is still nominally under development but is actually sputtering along in a neglected corner of the IT department with ever-diminishing resources allocated to it. (I'm in IT. I've been on projects like that. Everyone knows they've failed but the guy who started them has internal political clout and would be humiliated if the project failed so they never ... quite ... formally ... die)
The next front of the struggle of course will be beating back the attempt of some awful tech entrepreneur to replace every writer or artist in the field with chatbots and ai image generators.
I think the crypto incursion into the TTRPG space has largely collapsed under the weight of its own horsecrap at this point. I certainly haven't heard much recently about, for instance, Kickstarter's attempt to 'go on the blockchain,' and I strongly suspect it's either been quietly wound up as a big embarrassing failure, or else is still nominally under development but is actually sputtering along in a neglected corner of the IT department with ever-diminishing resources allocated to it. (I'm in IT. I've been on projects like that. Everyone knows they've failed but the guy who started them has internal political clout and would be humiliated if the project failed so they never ... quite ... formally ... die)
The next front of the struggle of course will be beating back the attempt of some awful tech entrepreneur to replace every writer or artist in the field with chatbots and ai image generators.
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
Do they have much overhead beyond website hosting and shoving gamers' money into their pockets? They are full of vague plans about what they're going to do, but beyond "2023" there's no real timetable for it, other than a threat that they're going to start more actively asking for money by the end of the month.
I assume they're running multiple hustles like these at once and just bringing in sufficient revenue from each to not have to get real jobs yet.
I assume they're running multiple hustles like these at once and just bringing in sufficient revenue from each to not have to get real jobs yet.
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
By the way, if you scroll down the page and look at the examples, it looks like they've got a handful of templates that they rotate a set of premade appearances onto. The artists, if they got paid at all, are likely no longer in the picture.
humble minion
Legend
Judging from what their previous person said while posting on here, there's a not-insignificant tech development staff. This is primarily a tech startup rather than a game publisher, remember, and tech development is expensive. Wages, hardware, software licences, cloud hosting. It all costs, a lot. One thing that DID make me sympathetic to the guy was that after spending years in the penny-squeezed TTRPG industry and publishing space, he was basically blissed out at the pay, conditions, facilities, and treatment of workers that he was discovering in IT startup world.
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
I get that, but should we believe that this is occupying 100% of their time? Wouldn't it make more sense (to the extent any of these things ever make sense) to have several products that all use the same resources, to defray the costs among several pools of customers?
humble minion
Legend
The way these things usually work is that a venture capitalist shovels a vast amount of money upfront at a fast-talker with a good sales pitch, and then the talker can spend that money trying to build an actual tech base and business out of it. It's then a race, to see if the money runs out before the tech team can develop something that, even if it doesn't make money yet, is convincing enough that the venture capitalist or other investors will chip in more to finish it off. There is no theoretical limit to this cycle. Twitter grew huge without being profitable based on this very dynamic.
But regardless, you have to get your tech base sorted before you can show anyone anything at all. There's massive upfront costs in developing something like this. Any big tech project is a money pit for years. You have to get SOMETHING functioning nice and early so investors have something cool to look at (I suspect that's why these people had their pretty pictures ready to go years ago when there seemed to be very little else), but all the finicky boring networking and scaling and security and management tooling and error handling and deployment/integration pipeline stuff is where all the real time and effort goes. And until that foundation is working, you've got nothing you can sell to anyone.
I'm sure the investors have other irons in the fire. Senior management might too. but I have no problems at all believing that the technical people are 100% focused on this (and are probably carrying a very sizeable workload in the process)
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
I am sympathetic to the post-pandemic tech job situation, but man, it'd be nice if these folks were doing something more positive for humanity, like being hitmen or something.
humble minion
Legend
I strongly suspect that many of them know the project is a non-starter (the crossover between techie and gamer is ... significant ... after all), and are just cashing in at this point.
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