I think having a redbubble account or something similar where people can pay for artwork on clothes or items or just prints would be best. You could also maybe auction prints of the cover art that is signed by the artist and the author?
I’m not familiar with NFTs but whenever I hear someone talk about them are always spoken of negatively.
It was a shock to learn that a company I previously had only good things to say about might start associating with crypto. I foresaw my medium-term future as writing for CoG, and this had the potential to torpedo that in an instant. But the phrase was unnecessary and rude, I apologise.
I lived in the UK before moving to the US, so I do have some understanding of the difficulties around international money transfers. Banking sucks. It is my view that cryptocurrencies are far worse.
Sure. The idea of doing NFT/crypto things at CoG was floated in this thread, and the replies from customers and writers were almost all a variation on “please don’t” and “I will never support the company again”.
Others have been more expansive about the conceptual/material problems they have with cryptocurrency. I have my own ideological issues, with their genesis being the ‘Austrian School’ of economic thought, the political views of the more powerful players in the scene, and so on. But it’s probably not productive for either of us to get into all that.
Especially as…
I would agree with this.
I would like to see someone from CoG respond to what @Daniel_Jakubowski has to say, rather than quit the thread.
All these points are valid ones, and I understand it well enough.
Holding and warehousing inventory would be a great deal harder than what you are likely having to juggle already. That’s an entirely new level of work whatwith counting inventory, shipping it out, and keeping an eye on how things are progressing.
Outsourcing orders for a shirt or merchandise through a third party, where you send the logo or design and they create it would be a great alternative, in my own opinion. Or if some artists have their own websites where they have work for sale, having a link to that would be a good way to promote the artist when they’re not making artwork for the games.
However, I would say I hold any story I buy.
It’s digital, yes. It’s not an actual book where I can turn the pages physically, not a real book in the sense I can feel the cover beneath my hands or bathe in the scent of a freshly printed paper (which is, admittingly, a scent I love). But the fact that an Interactive Fiction story isn’t a book in a physical sense doesn’t mean I don’t have it in hand.
The story is bought online, yes. They’re stored on the omnibus or a Steam library.
Regardless of that, I’m still holding the game/story. I bought that game with money I earned from working in a business I run, money that I then put into a bank account I have direct access to (and I also have direct access to the people, face-to-face, in that bank), and the games I read and play are read and played on a phone I had bought.
In that way, the story is very much in my hands.
I bought the game and played it on my own phone that I bought with actual money, that has physical money I can draw out of my bank whenever I need. Can’t exactly do that with cryptocurrency or anything similar to it because it’s a digital form of currency.
Which I have no control over.
Paypal, for instance, is an online bank. However, the money put into comes from one bank and into another. The money in it is, more often than not, real money. I can take the money in Paypal and despoit in my bank, and then I can withdraw that money and have real cash in my hands in a few days after the bank goes through all the loops that are required to authenticate that the transaction is a real transaction. Slow, yes, but preferable.
Beyond the lack of control, with digital currency, people can’t walk into a bank and talk to the people one-on-one unless they live in an area where there’s access to it. And, to be bluntly honest, I want nothing to do with a bank or money system I can’t interact with physically.
There’s a lot of factors to consider, without a doubt. People have very heated thoughts on this, including myself, and people are going to have worries and doubts no matter how the court case comes out because technology can be hacked. I’ll take a physical bank any day.
The impact on the environment is one, yes. Which is something the community is worried about, and for good reason. Another point would be people being worried about digital NFTs aren’t really in our control. They’re handled by a third party we have no contact with, people that can turn on or shut off our access at a moment’s notice without any warning.
Another thought is this:
How would you apply these NFTs across the company, should they be used?
In Hosted Games, a large number of do the artwork and the covers of their stories on their own. How, hypothetically speaking, would it be applied? Would it be mandatory? Would writers who are heavily opposed to NFTs be able to not have it applied to their stories?
And across Choice of Games and Choice of Romance, if a writer is opposed to NFTs, would you leave it out for them because of the fact they are opposed? Or would you disregard that because it would then be a ‘company policy,’ therefore alienating your writers in favor of supporting the artists? Which many would take as simply a means to make more money, leaving the impression the company cares more about money than the people supporting them. Which is also bad for business.
As the possibility of NFTs is not set in stone, it is a wise move to consider all sides as well as how implementing any one of them would impact sales and loyal buyers. If a large portion is heavily opposed, you’ll lose writers and fans. Which would be bad for business. If one of the writers is fairly popular and has a lot of people buying their works, which also drives in a lot of sales, having people opt out of buying would be even worse.
This is a very delicate situation, one which has a very heated pool of opinions surrounding it. If there’s one thing I did learn in my business classes in college, it’s that a business can’t stand without the community it rests upon and the people that support it. It’s like the old saying that a kingdom is nothing without the people that rest within its borders.
Out of all the Interactive Fiction areas I’ve come across, it’s this company that I truly enjoy and have come to love. The writers are good at what they do, the forum is full of supportive individuals, and people are, generally but not always, polite.
I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on where Choice of Games will take this. The way you and the company decide to take this after everyone’s voiced their concerns and their opposition will say far more than anything written down in a form.
Here’s to hoping that this meets a conclusion everyone will be content with.
The fiction is much appreciated, but in an effort to keep things sort of on topic, I regretfully have deleted a few posts that involved body pillows, with the utmost respect.
I would unironically buy FunkoPops of some of my favourite characters from these games.
Edit: For the sake of staying on topic. How come these things need so much energy it fucks up the environment?
That’s part of the scam. A lot of the people making actual can-pay-the-bills-with-money are rich assholes who make money through owning coalplants, mines, etc.
I think @Daniel_Jakubowski can explain it better.
Made an account just to say that of CoG tries any bullshit with NFT’s I’ll boycott. I’m not taking part or buying from CoG if it’s taking part in a scam because some guy got duped into thinking they’re a good business opportunity.
Edit: so why close the forum if you’re still wanting people to answer questions for you even tho you’ve made it clear you’re not interested in hearing them by closing it? It’s actually kinda helped make up my mind between here and twine. See ya!
I explain how they use so much energy in this reply:
But for a tl;dr: cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Bitcoin etc that are mined use more and more complex math puzzles, which reward one token per solved puzzle. All the puzzles are arbitrary by the way, they serve no purpose other than to make the creation of the coin more and more difficult to drive up scarcity.
So initially you have a bunch of ScamCoins mined very quickly because the puzzles can be all solved by the founder’s crappy laptop, but as more and more people join in and begin mining, the difficulty of the puzzles the computer has to solve starts ramping up faster and faster. You need to add more and more computing power, and you end up with situations like where Ethereum now takes an entire town’s yearly output of electricity to mine just a few NFT tokens.
So that’s the tl;dr on mined crypto.
What Jason was thinking of adding, XRP, was a different type of crypto that is not mined, but validated by the corporation that issues it. This basically means it’s kind of like a regular paper currency, except regular paper currency has historical, established value and is linked, directly or indirectly, to some form of real world value (the Polish Zloty for example, as well as quite a few other currencies iirc, used to be based on the value of gold). XRP’s value is dictated by the issuing companies, based on there being a limited amount of issued tokens (scarcity is necessary to drive up value). This means it lacks some of the benefits of mined crypto, like it being independent, though it is more environmentally friendly. It can, however, be deliberately and easily tanked at any moment, thru the company issuing more tokens. It also directly supports the issuing company, because it costs them nothing to create tokens, but you have to pay them to get them. They basically created money from nothing and anyone with the slightest grasp of how economy works knows that’s shady.
If I’m understanding you correctly, XRP is… company money? Like, when there used to be company towns and people got paid in credits that could only be spent in the company store?
I’ve always found the REAL strength of actual money is that it’s a government’s IOU; it’s basically “you hand us this thing valued X, and we give you services worth X”. It’s why it was possible to get rid of the gold standard and everything kept trucking on without (additional) difficulties. And because EVERYONE needs to deal with the government (via taxes if nothing else), money is worth its value to everyone. So the dude you get your groceries from will take your government IOU in exchange for the groceries, because he can hand that IOU to the government when the time comes, and he can also hand it to anyone else because those people will also have to deal with the government.
This is when crypto, even if (and that’s a big if) you set aside ethical considerations, really flounders, because it’s not an IOU issued by someone everyone has to deal with. As an example, at one point crypto folk were really happy because Tesla started accepting bitcoin, but, like, that still left bitcoin useless to anyone who wasn’t interested in buying Tesla stuff. Your grocer still wasn’t going to accept bitcoin, because even if they were interested in buying Tesla stuff, they had no way of knowing if other people they need to pay would be.
My criticism of crypto is that people who are “into crypto” go on these massive rants about the technical specifications to try and justify getting into crypto, but at the end of the day all you’re doing is trying to buy low and sell high. No amount of technical explanation can disguise the fact that it’s just gambling.
You keep making incorrect or false statements. So, allow me to set the record straight.
PoW puzzles are not to drive up scarcity, they’re to make hacking the system too expensive to be attractive.
If you want to know the logic behind PoW, I recommend this video:
No. It’s validated by nodes, almost none of which are the corporation itself.
Yet, no “real world” currency has a link to “real world value.” The only value is what it can be exchanged for. There are no national currencies back by gold any more, for example. They’re only backed by the power of their governments.
Again, incorrect. Any currency’s value is based on what someone else will trade for it.
Again, incorrect. 100 billion XRP were created at the beginning of the XRPL, and each transaction permanently burns/destroys 0.00001 XRP, creating a deflationary currency.
Again, they can’t create more tokens. And no one has to pay them anything. No one needs to buy XRP.
I don’t understand what the scam would be here. People keep saying “it’s a scam.” Where’s the scam?
As a point of comparison, do you consider these wallpapers (or things of their ilk) scams?
Is it because there’s no DRM? I mean, on some level, that’s what an NFT is: DRM.
What about art print shops?
Why are these things acceptable, but NFTs are a scam? I honestly don’t understand the distinction.
I could not disagree with you more. Allow me to quote myself.
Right now, it takes about eight days for a paper check to be delivered in the US, and another day for the check to clear. That’s nine days for a US-based author to be able to spend the money they are owed by COG for their royalties.
I could send with Paypal, but Paypal takes 3%. 3% sucks. (And that’s just in the US. It’s about 10% to someone outside the US.)
If I could send using an XRP-based service, then at the cost of ~$0.03 they could have the money in their bank account in less than 15 seconds. I would never force someone to use such a service, but for people who want their money instantly, I would be remiss not to offer them the option.
(If you consider that to be a “technical specification rant,” then I guess that it is. But from an Accounts Payable situation, the ability to pay anyone in the world, at any time of day or night, at the cost of $0.03, is extremely attractive.)
This is obviously not happening anytime soon, so musing about possibilities further serves no purpose.
I don’t understand this claim. The entire point of an NFT (and crypto in general) is that it would be entirely under your control. You could put it on a cold storage wallet that only you know the passcode to, and if you died, the NFT would be inaccessible. It’s the very definition of in your control.
I hear that. However, in my experience, banks are already decreasing their footprints. As real estate prices rise in cities and the cost of customer acquisition increases, they’re closing branches and even ATMs. I would posit that seeing a banker in person is going to become a luxury over the next decade.
I wish that were unrestrictedly true, but it’s not. Take the instance of your phone and the apps you buy there. If you “buy” an app, Apple/Google/Amazon only guarantee you access to that app for 90 days. After that time, there is no guarantee that you will continue to have access to it. If the app is taken off the store, you are no longer able to download it.
In my case, for example, I purchased the “Vampire Prelude” story published by White Wolf about eight years ago. But when I upgraded my phone, the app didn’t come along with the upgrade, and it’s now just gone.
Now, Choice of Games is committed to keeping you in connection to your games, but if we went out of business, the App Stores would probably take down our games, and as soon as you upgraded your phone, all those apps would disappear.
Steam would be the exception to this, but that’s only as long as Steam exists.
I already addressed this point previously. Restating it doesn’t strengthen it.
I also addressed this point previously. As I said before, cash is also untraceable. Also, please see my previous statements about the Colonial Pipeline hack.
No one’s going to spend $200k on one of our art pieces, so I don’t see why your point matters. Are you saying we shouldn’t allow NFTs because some people use them to launder money? Then does that mean we should not allow people to own real estate, because some people use them to launder money?
In addition, if we were to set the smartcontract up with royalties to the stakeholders, laundering money through our NFTs would be inefficient/costly.
You’re making this out like everyone who even looks at our forum is going to have their bank accounts frozen. Whatever your point is here, it’s unclear.
Again, what does this have to do with us minting NFTs? You’re making wild connections and invoking bogeymen but with no connection to the subject at hand.
Please review any of several times I’ve spoken to this already in this thread.
What scheme?
It looks to me from this thread like the views of this community are abundantly clear. Sometimes it’s just better to read the room than to go down in flames trying to convince everybody that you’re “right”. That’s certainly true if you want customers who’ll be willing to buy your products and authors and artists who’ll be willing to work with your company.
Believe me, I’ve read the room. And I’ve even acknowledged twice in this thread that NFTs clearly aren’t happening, at least anytime soon.
But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m intensely curious to understand where this reaction to them comes from. I haven’t heard a credible objection to them (XRPL NFTs, not Ethereum ones) yet.
I think people are still upset because the added
Makes people afraid to sign away a game they have spent years making, or even using an engine that they don’t know the future of.
As the topic is in slow mode I can only answer you here @jasonstevanhill
Readers and authors, the ones I’ve seen on Tumblr, don’t want to take part in a company that uses NFTs. And because the future suddenly is shaky about NFTs, authors feel uncomfortable writing for CoG.
I really don’t understand. Sign away what game? And what does the CS engine have to do with NFTs?
Just something to think about with crypto - it’s expensive and involves having savings you can afford to lose. I don’t know about anyone else but I simply could never afford to risk my funds to buy crypto, and to buy an NFT which… I mean. I can’t even tangibly own. I mean. It’s unrealistic. We are willing to save to put our hard earned cash into stories we love, authors we love. But asking us to put money into crypto so we can support the artists? I’m not even touching what they do for the planet. I’m just talking about the practicality of expecting fans of this very niche interest to have crypto to spend is a bit… Ridiculous. If I had some savings, I’d had a good couple of months and there was a mug, or a t shirt, or a tote bag I could buy with art from some of my favourite books on here. Then yeah, I’d consider buying it if I knew that the author and artist were getting a fair share of the profits.
Sorry - a customer expressed what they value about your product, the reasoning behind why they consider your product ‘fun’ and a ‘delight,’ in response they got an explanation why the positive feelings they associate with the brand are wrong and inaccurate?
I keep writing and rewriting a longer post, but I’m at a loss, here. My argument from the start has been that this will damage CoG’s reputation. You could ‘win’ an internet debate (although I personally find the arguments against NFT more compelling than the ones in favor) and still lose this community. If that doesn’t matter, I don’t know what to say.
I’d no idea crypto had become this much of a shibboleth issue. Very eye-opening.
At the end of the day-- setting to one side Daniel’s warnings about hostile/fearful regulation, which I’m in no place to evaluate-- the reason given that I think you should take most seriously is probably:
That’s answerable, obviously… as with any industry with a terrible track record and debatable social utility, you can argue over whether small, early attempts at a cleaned-up version should be treated as a wedge of positive change or a bit of whitewash on an industry that should ideally be regulated out of existence.
But people who want to see gratuitous new energy-hogging industries shut down have picked the strategy of stigmatizing the words “crypto” and “NFT” without nuance or exception. This thread suggests how successful that strategy has been among CoG’s target demographic.
So as much as it may be reasonable in theory to argue for:
that’s not where the activists are, including a surprisingly unanimous chunk of your customer and author community. They’re not interested in trying to steer the NFT market toward eco-friendly alternatives; and they might well be right that it would risk just being a figleaf for the continued dominance of big PoW operators in a market that would be best to just shut down as part of getting to net zero.
I do think it’s ironic that so many don’t see anything problematic about CoG just producing physical bumf instead, as if that’s not also wasteful of carbon, water, and biodiversity.
This a hundred times. Genuinely ethical clothes are freaking expensive, and ethical cotton in particular is hard to come by. Any company selling you on their totally organic, totally fair-trade North Indian cotton fields is papering over some deeply problematic stuff.
I don’t think anything said in this thread gives any grounds to speculate that CoG is considering this out of financial desperation.
That’s of course a different kettle of fish than trying to sell NFTs to your customer base… which based on this thread, I’ve gotta say, is unlikely to be receptive enough for the new income to be a game-changer for either artists or company. (I know the total player base is different to the forum community, but on this one, I’d not bet the farm on the assumption that they’re going to have substantially different reactions.)
I’m not trying to convince you that we should do NFTs. I’ve already conceded three times (now four!) that we’re not going to get into NFTs anytime soon. I don’t think you need to say anything more about it.
What I’m asking for is, what factual arguments do you have against NFTs? Because no one has answered that question.
EDIT: Thanks Joel.
This is a factual argument very much worth considering. Give me a bit to cogitate.