Whistleblower and Cybersecurity Expert, Edward Snowden has expressed his concerns about how some privileged individuals or companies may use NFTs in the gaming industry. He said that while he had seen NFTs used to raise funds for charity, he was concerned with the tokens “creeping into gaming”. He added that gamers should be cautious of a scenario where “artificial scarcity” will be created to serve a narrow circle of investors.
Furthermore, Snowden called certain parts of the metaverse “horrible, and heinous, and tragic”. According to him, metaverse aims to capitalise on users in the virtual world. Snowden was speaking at the BlockDown DeData online conference, along with Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood.
Edward Snowden’s warnings to the gaming community
“We have people that are trying to [inject] an artificial sense of scarcity into a post-scarcity domain,” Edward Snowden said. “I think the community should very much be trying to bend the arc of development away from injecting artificial, unnecessary scarcity entirely for the benefit of some investor class.”
However, Wood disagreed with Snowden. He equated NFTs in the gaming industry to that of music NFTs.
“I don’t have any issue with game developers restricting access to their product in the same way that they already have for decades before,” Wood said. “I see NFTs as a more agile way of restricting access to their product.”
Countering Wood, Snowden added that unlike with works of art, gamers don’t receive a guaranteed product. Rather, they simply get a “chance at something, without the promise of something”. This, he added, creates an opportunity for exploiting gamers.
The comments of the experts come as an increasing number of gaming firms are adopting NFTs. EA games CEO, Andrew Wilson, for instance, said last month that NFTs and P2E games are the future of the industry.
All investment/financial opinions expressed by NFTevening.com are not recommendations.
This article is educational material.
As always, make your own research prior to making any kind of investment.
