"Company creates, then deletes NFTs of retro games it didn't own the rights to"

[kane_magus]

Another little turd on the NFT shitpile.

"MetaGravity claims that its intent is to 'preserve abandonware' in the way 'a lot of abandonware sites are doing.'"

Three points, in addition to the ones made by the article itself (which seems to be stuck mostly on the "they were selling things they don't have the right to sell" point).

1. Those abandonware sites, regardless of their dubious legality, already exist, which makes these NFTs superfluous at best and outright scams at worse. (They're the latter, obviously.)


2. The NFTs (or, rather, the things the NFTs point to) can still be deleted after the fact. This was proven by the fact that these MetaGravity asshats, you know, deleted the games after the fact, when they got into hot water for selling shit they didn't have the rights to sell. Which means that putting games into NFTs/blockchain is no more "permanent" a solution to games preservation than any other already existing method.


3. Even if this were a good faith effort at "games preservation," which I don't believe it was, because it clearly wasn't, the NFTs themselves are "preserving" exactly jack and shit, because the NFTs only hold a small amount of data, such as, say, a URL to a normal-ass website from which one would download the games being "preserved" in the NFT. They're not going to be storing a whole-ass game in a NFT. It would be exactly as useful as me selling someone a piece of paper with an abandonware site URL scribbled on it in crayon (regardless of whether or not I, myself, actually owned or had anything at all whatsoever to do with said URL). The NFT itself is only an extraneous middleman that enables scammers and conmen like this Rashin Mansoor shitbird to make money from dumbfuck idiots who still mistakenly believe that NFTs are somehow a good idea on which to spend their money. It's incredibly easy, far too easy, to be "rug-pulled" by shit like this.

"Mansoor didn't seem too upset about the chain of events, claiming the point of this NFT collection 'experiment' was to preserve abandonware games on the blockchain. 'We've proved the point of the tech demo and going to focus our efforts on the next phase of the tech innovation for playable machine code NFTs,' he said."

You didn't prove shit, you fuckhead, aside from the fact that there are still morons out there willing to throw their money away on worse-than-useless NFT dumbfuckery, and now you're just moving on to the next grift, that's all.

So no, in conclusion, this was not meant "to 'preserve abandonware' in the way 'a lot of abandonware sites are doing.'" It was meant to scam people, plain and simple, just like pretty much every other NFT "project" does. I mean, it's pretty telling that it can be claimed, truly, that scuzzy abandonware websites are legitimately less scuzzy than this shit is.

Comments

[owsf2000]

I completely agree it was a scam and there was no good faith involved in the whole affair.

I would point out however that putting an entire game in the blockchain is technically possible. I remember a story about one dev that did that. And how it went horribly wrong when, like pretty much all modern games, after release there were some bugs in the code that needed to be fixed. And when they fixed them they realized it completely fucked their blockchain. People who bought the game, didn't register as having bought the updated less-buggy version.

In terms of roms of old console games, that might technically work. Given they're actually in a state of being bug free. (more or less) But the entire thing would just end up being a scam either way - a solution looking for a problem since people can already get their hands on those types of roms fairly easily if they spend a few minutes looking or asking around. It ain't needed to preserve the games.

[kane_magus]

Huh, now that you mention it, I do seem to remember hearing something about that, though I couldn't find anything about it in any of my previous posts on the subject. (Or was it something you posted about in your DW page?)

So I guess it would be more like me selling a paper with all of a game's source code written on it in crayon. Or maybe less useful than that, given that you could, conceivably, erase or mark over crayon in order to fix bugs in the code, at least, without having to recopy everything from scratch onto a new piece of paper. (Well, and there's the fact that you can't actually play a game off of a crayon-scribbled piece of paper, I suppose, so the analogy breaks down there somewhat. *shrug*)

Off on a tangent, I remember some old shareware games that had disclaimers on them when you booted them up something to the effect of "this game is available for free, so if you paid any money for it, you got scammed," and this whole "paying for a NFT of an abandonware game" thing definitely has that same vibe to it. Basically, if the person making money off of it is not a person who helped to create the game in the first place (or, at the very least, is not a person who paid big money to gain the "legit" rights to sell said game), then that person is nothing more than a scammer. And I would also say that even if the person is someone who helped create/bought the rights to sell the game, they're still a scammer, regardless, if they're selling the game via grossly overpriced NFTs, abandonware or not.