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This Week in Games - We Never Asked for This

Kirby and the Forgotten Land is launching much sooner than we all expected on March 55th

I'm very much looking forward to playing it, but I have a gut feeling that this is going to be the most divisive Kirby game among hardcore and casual puffball fans alike.

Now there's the same sort of hype building around Pokemon Legends Arceus and that new Sonic game because, like Forgotten Land, it's "open world". Since copy abilities are confirmed, I'm expecting a Kirby-ass Kirby game, open world or no, but others seem to be hoping for the next Super Mario Odyssey. It's gonna be even worse with that Sonic game, since Sonic-ass Sonic games often aren't very good.

Now there's the same sort of hype building around Pokemon Legends Arceus and that new Sonic game because, like Forgotten Land, it's "open world". Since copy abilities are confirmed, I'm expecting a Kirby-ass Kirby game, open world or no, but others seem to be hoping for the next Super Mario Odyssey. It's gonna be even worse with that Sonic game, since Sonic-ass Sonic games often aren't very good.

None of the higher-ups in suits at game publishers and hardware manufacturers actually understand these concepts – or that the game-playing consumers are skeptical about these things -- but they know that they are media buzzwords that garner excitement among investors and financial influencers. (The finance people are the guys trying to hype up these stupid concepts by claiming things like “imagine owning a special gun in one game… and then taking that same gun to another game!” without understanding how things like game development or even basic gameplay work.)

I agree it sounds like mostly buzzwords and marketing, but the idea is promising and already out there.

It sounds like the only main difference is being able to buy and sell these kinds of things on the player-end which I'd be pretty happy about since it would finally give players a bit of consumer power in our digital purchases.

I'm a Kirby fan. I haven't played every game in the series, but merely a lot of them, including a couple that were not very good (Mass Attack and Dream Land 2, in case anyone's wondering).

Xbox boss Phil Spencer was asked about NFTs during an interview with Axios's Stephen Totilo, and his answer was a breath of fresh air amid a landscape of increasing support for the tokens. “I think there’s a lot of speculation and experimentation that’s happening, and that some of the creative that I see today feels more exploitive than about entertainment,” Spencer said.

That suggests it's going to be a while before we see NFTs on Xbox, something that might not sit well with some of the studios already dead set on using them. Square Enix, Ubisoft, and EA have all openly revealed their intentions to incorporate NFTs into their games.

One of the core issues with NFTs in games is presenting the idea as anything meaningfully new for the industry in the first place. Digital item scarcity and real money markets for game items are already a thing, and have been for decades. The idea of “decentralized” ownership is supposed to add some sort of next level of security, but it’s hard to know if the concept can be fully trusted (see many, many NFT scams over the past year) or if the potential environmental impact of involving the blockchain is worth any of this.

NFT games are a burgeoning industry, but still very, very small. Oftentimes proponents compare the scene to the early days of the mobile games industry, which ended up exploding to become the largest chunk of gaming in general. And yet I think mobile saw a clear hole in the market and filled it, while NFTs seem like they’re just adding additional steps and additional risk to concepts that have already existed in gaming for a very long time.