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NFT games are scams, and Logan Paul's abandoned game proves it

NFT games are scams, and Logan Paul's abandoned game proves it

21 View2023-01-05
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NFTs (or non-fungible tokens, for the non-crypto enthusiasts reading this) had a rough year in 2022. After a year-plus of explosive growth and tons of tech and video game companies looking into the concept, 2022 saw the whole house of cards come crashing down, alongside a lot of other cryptocurrency problems.
How bad was it? According to crypto market publication Decrpyt, the total NFT trading volume plummeted 88% between January and November of last year. That's just about as close as you can get to rock bottom without literally hitting rock bottom.
But just because NFTs are finally faltering doesn't mean there isn't money to be made off of them by scamming innocent, naive "investors." Just look at the latest scandal involving CryptoZoo, a "play-to-earn" NFT game that was formerly advertised by YouTube star and WWE wrestler Logan Paul.
The whole story is broken down in the above video from YouTuber Cofeezilla, the first in a three-part investigation. Coffeezilla was digging into CryptoZoo for over a year, and what he found reveals what many of us have long suspected about the majority of NFT projects: It's all just a big scam.
To give the quick and dirty version: CryptoZoo was a "game" using NFTs that Logan Paul announced on an episode of his podcast in summer of 2021. The pitch was that players would purchase a special crypto token using real money, which could then be spent to purchase eggs. Those eggs would hatch into random animals. Different animals could be combined to create new and rare variants, and the rarer your creature, the faster it would passively earn that aforementioned crypto token.
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That idea of passively earning tokens which can then be turned into real money is at the heart of "play-to-earn" games. Axie Infinity (pictured above) is probably the best and most successful example of play-to-earn, and it's one I tried out for myself in 2021, just to see what the hype was all about.
You can make money by playing a video game? That sounds awesome, right?! What could go wrong?
Well, even with a relatively "successful" example like Axie Infinity—at least, it was successful until the crypto market collapsed a few months ago—there's usually a lot more paying than there is of either playing or earning. I sure didn't make any money trying out Axie Infinity despite an initial buy-in of several hundred dollars.
But I'm not smart with money, so don't take my word for it! One blogger, a software engineer with expertise in tech, crypto, and NFT games, shared their experience of playing Axie Infinity for a week for around three hours every day and making a grand total of just over $10. And that was after their investment of $800 just to get started. Cool!
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But if even the legit "play-to-earn" games are underwhelming cash grabs at best, CryptoZoo allegedly presents a much more common scenario for this type of game: full-on scam. CryptoZoo launched in fall of 2021, and plenty of Logan Paul fans eagerly bought in, some spending tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, because they trusted a project that Paul put his name behind.
Unfortunately, that trust was very misplaced if the reporting by Coffeezilla is correct. CryptoZoo's launch was as bare-bones as NFT projects get. The "animals" that "players" hatched from the eggs they purchased were just stock photos. The "really fun game" that Logan Paul promised in his announcement wasn't there. There was no gameplay at all. And while hatched animals yielded tokens as promised, there was reportedly no actual way to cash out those tokens. All the money that eager early adopters had poured into CryptoZoo was stuck inside of that system.
CryptoZoo may end up being a particularly egregious and well-known case of NFT scamming due to the involvement of Logan Paul, but it's far from the only case. And while a lot of gaming companies have started shifting away from NFTs as this tech "innovation" has quickly decreased in popularity, some are staying firm that this is the future.
For example, Final Fantasy publisher Square Enix says it has "multiple blockchain games" in development, though at least they're all new IP. In addition to NFT-based and play-to-earn games, the company has also made plans to release Final Fantasy-branded NFTs not tied to any specific gaming project.
Maybe Square Enix will surprise me and deliver a blockchain game that's actually worth checking out. Or maybe some smaller developer or start-up will finally release a project that realizes how to blend the world of NFTs and gaming in some fresh, actually fun way. I'd love to be proven wrong.
I'm skeptical, though, and until that mythical good NFT game comes out, I'm going to continue assuming that all NFT games are scams.
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Ahmad SP
Ahmad SP
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7

there aren't any nft that are actually good

2023-01-06

Author liked
dark razy
dark razy
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3

lol

2023-01-05

Author liked
VSiFer
VSiFer
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2

Any reasonable person with the least knowledge about NFTs sees how fraudulent this market is.

2023-01-07

Author liked
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absolute steaming pile of p2w monitization +nft+crypto currency. the game is auto playing itself too, so I guess the point is for us to "invest" thousands of dollars in their crypto currencies since you never really play the actual game.
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User508411045 (Muted)2K2023-01-11
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Nothing new same auto play scam just with NFTs to waste more cash into.
Richie182023-01-10
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