Shuji Utsumi, Sega’s co-CEO, comments in a new statement that there is no point in implementing blockchain technology if it doesn’t make games ‘fun’.
Shuji Utsumi, Sega’s co-CEO, comments in a new statement that there is no point in implementing blockchain technology if it doesn’t make games ‘fun’.
Can you unpack this? Not saying you’re wrong, I’d just a clearer idea of what it demonstrates.
The big thing that web3(which includes the blockchain) represents to me is big tech’s magpie-like tendencies, an attraction to shiny and new things for the sake of them without any thought towards how it will bring value to the customer. Everything new has to be presented as big and inevitable as home computing was in the 80s. The problem though is that even if we give web3 the most generous bearth it is at best an iterative improvement that can only truly improve certain niches. And we’ve seen this toxic hype cycle with everything whether that be the cloud or VR/AR or even 3D Technology back in the day.
I most associate web3 with decentralization. That includes the Fediverse, IPFS, and (begrudgingly) crypto. Of these, crypto seems the most like a solution in search of a problem - Bitcoin had a problem, centralized currency, but fintech got ahold of it and treated it like a stock asset instead of a currency.
It seems a bit like the toxic hype is paralleled with true hype in a weird way, as if astroturfing was trying to draw attention towards their perversions. For instance, edge computing (true decentralization) is hyped as cloud computing (centralized services which are somewhere else). Language models (which can act as general-purpose inference engines) are hyped as chatbots which replace humans (very, very poorly). Or heck, crypto as a means to make money rather than a way to coordinate trustless actors - best use-case I’ve seen is FileCoin, which incentivizes people to host IPFS chunks, a measurable good to society which gets compensation.