SAN FRANCISCO — A gaming executive was caught on a hot mic recently bemoaning the fact that no one warned him his company’s new NFT-focused game wasn’t going to be received very well.
“It’s just not fair you guys,” said Scott Pittman, CEO of Refractal Games, who just released the poorly performing Smokin’ Tokenz, a PvP shooter with NFT integration heavily woven into its gameplay. “I was told pretty convincingly by a young man wearing shorts that this NFT thing was going to be the future and that we’d make a lot of easy money. He said people would be excited to buy and sell stuff with real money inside of a video game. Did no one let our consumers know that this was the way of the future? It’s a real pain in my ass the way these gamers are saying it makes no fucking sense and no one wants it at all. It’s not really fair to me, you know?”
Refractal Games employees who worked on Smokin’ Tokenz, which currently holds a conglomerate score of 9 on Metacritic, said the company had every indication it wasn’t going to be well received.
“It really wasn’t hard to read the room on NFTs,” said Dylan Singleton, a Refractal employee who spent the last two years working on Smokin’ Tokenz. “Everyone who didn’t have their thumb on their scale was happy to tell anyone that would listen that NFTs sounded awful at best and completely fraudulent at worst. Video games are actually fine and I somehow don’t think the future of finance is in auctioning digital tokens to other weirdos. Hey, did the boss get laid off? ‘Cause I just got laid off. I think I’ll try to hit him on the way out.”
Despite the promises of financial advocates, gamers have been skeptical about the value of NFT’s since their inception.
“Remember when those money dorks were talking about how we could take an item from one game and use it in any other game?” asked Lynn Shields, a financial reporter for Forbes. “And the funny thing is I think they thought it was real. They really thought you might find Diddy Kong inside of a barrel in Grand Theft Auto one day. They called it the future of video games. I mean, they will be a historic part of video games maybe, in the sense that NFT’s are going down in history with the Virtual Boy and that landfill of ET cartridges. Just an absolute hall of fame embarrassment that anyone could have told you was going to be a bust. So yes, they’re making history in that sense. Way to go, bros.”
As of press time, Refractal Games executives announced that the company would be pivoting away from video game development and shifting its focus to scamming retirees.
