There's a chance, if you don't care about / dislike NFTs (same), Web3 games (same), or cryptocurrency (three for three), you've never heard of Pudgy Penguins. But the NFT brand has somehow made its way onto Walmart shelves and launched a game this month, which has already been hit by a pretty nasty phishing scam.

As pointed out by Malwarebytes, the phishing site abuses the fact that the web browser game Pudgy World connects to users' crypto wallets to verify digital items.

The site is intended to mimic the verification step, which shows the user a fake wallet unlock screen. This then redirects them to hand over all of their information. "To the user, it looks for all the world like the real crypto wallet software they already trust."

Malwarebytes notes that the level of detail on this phishing site is high, not only accurately replicating the site's design but even a pop-up window to resemble Reown WalletConnect, a wallet connection library that Pudgy World uses.

Interestingly, the fake pop-up then renders an overlay, designed to look like the legitimate unlock screen. Where Pudgy World might send users to their own downloaded software, this website instead employs an overlay, tricking them into believing their own applications are being used.

"For every browser extension wallet on the list, the phishing site renders an unlock screen built to match the real extension’s own visual identity, with the correct logo, colour scheme, button layout, and wording."

The cunning tricks don't end there. Malwarebytes notes it's a "page that plays dead for researchers" by testing hardware, checking if it's run in a virtual machine, and looking for automated tools. Effectively, the malicious element of the attack simply doesn't load if it suspects researchers are accessing it.

Crypto owners are among those most targeted by hackers, likely related to the amount of currency they have in their wallets, and how easy it is to obscure transactions through the blockchain. Just last month, we saw a social engineering scam deepfaking CEOs, using fake troubleshooting programs to steal cryptocurrency. Even Cloudflare's recent report on today's threat landscape echoes a focus on cryptobros.

Naturally, to avoid being caught up in any scam, be vigilant of sites you enter, what information you give away, and the people who talk to you. Scams are only getting smarter, so users and cybersecurity experts have to get just as smart in response.

Remember NFTs? They're "here to stay," Reddit said in a 2021 report on the Next Big Thing, the year before it launched its NFT-based marketplace that enabled redditors to earn or purchase their own customizable avatars for the platform. Three years later, the situation has changed somewhat, and at least as far as Reddit's concerned, well, NFTs are going away.

Reddit actually announced the end of the program in August, talking about how wonderful and "extraordinary" the whole thing was—"You transformed Reddit by showing what was possible when creators were empowered to create, play, and showcase excellence"—while simultaneously giving everyone who owns them until January 1, 2026 to export their "Vault" to a third-party wallet or service. Miss that deadline, and "you'll be unable to transfer or sell your Collectible Avatars off-platform, and otherwise unable to access your Vault's underlying blockchain wallet for any purpose."

With less than a month left to go before those here-to-stay tokens are, well, not here anymore, Reddit has put out another notice reminding owners that once the clock hits zero, they'll be out of luck. They can still use the images of course—just right-click and "save image as," boom, there you go—but the non-fungible token that says the image is yours and yours alone will be the proverbial tears in rain: Another broken victim of humanity's relentless, unthinking, and fundamentally cruel drive for profit, heedless of the long-term cost to our souls.

Some Reddit NFT holders are portraying the change as no big deal: The tokens still exist, they'll just need to be accessed differently after the end of the year. That's true as far as it goes, but it fails to address what the change means in a wider context. Reddit clearly had major expectations for NFTs, but all of that—not just on Reddit, but everywhere—has gone up in smoke.

NFTs are still out there, as are true believers, but the dogged insistence that they're going to change the world? Just like the proverbial apes, that's all gone, baby: A 2024 report by crypto analysis firm NFT Evening found that 96% of NFTs "are dead," while a Yahoo Finance report from 2025 says "floor prices have collapsed, trading volumes have plunged, and the NFT market is now a shadow of its former self."

I suppose the bright side for people who don't export their Vaults before the deadline is that at least they're not losing much. And hey—the apes may be gone, but we'll always have this very special moment. Yeah, even back then, we knew.

Remember NFTs? Essentially JPEGs that cost a lot of money, non-fungible tokens were really big for a brief while among C-tier celebrities, budding criminals, and Ubisoft, until the internet was finally able to bully them out of sight and thus out of mind: Not really gone, but mostly forgotten. But a funny thing recently happened that dragged them back into my memory: Thousands of NFTs that people had paid millions of dollars for very suddenly disappeared—or at least the images associated with them did—not the result of a rug pull but because nobody was paying for the servers.

According to a 404 Media report, this all goes back to 2021 when Nike, the shoe company, acquired RTFKT—pronounced "artifact," although you can say it differently if you like—for an unknown but presumably astronomical amount of money. That partnership resulted in "CryptoKicks," more prosaically described as pictures of sneakers that rich people paid obscene amounts of money for, but RTFKT also partnered with other creators to churn out similarly pricey digital images.

One of those collections was Clone X, made in collaboration with Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, and this how the RTFKT website describes it:

In a moment that would redefine the intersection of contemporary art and digital culture, legendary artist Takashi Murakami joined forces with RTFKT to create something unprecedented: a collection of 20,000 extraterrestrial avatar clones that would bridge the worlds of fine art, digital identity, and creative expression. This collaboration didn't just merge NFTs with contemporary art—it catalyzed a new era of digital creativity that would generate over $1 billion in the secondary market and forever alter the landscape of digital identity.

Wow, eh? Ah, but it didn't last. Nike soured on NFTs and announced at the end of 2024 that it was pulling the plug on RTFKT. Around the same time, RTFKT said it would launch a new website to "honor and preserve" its legacy, and "that showcases the groundbreaking work that defined the RTFKT journey." And so it has.

But on April 24, more than 19,000 NFT images went poof for a few hours. It was awkward.

So what happened? According to the report, former RTFKT chief technology officer Samuel Cardillo, who stayed on as a consultant after Nike deep-sixed the operation, was moving the NFTs from a DigitalOcean cloud server to AWS, using Cloudflare as an intermediate part of the process. Carillo told 404 Media that he'd arranged to switch to a free Cloudflare plan because being on a paid plan "makes absolutely no sense anymore," what with RTFKT no longer existing, but Cloudflare triggered the change too soon. Whoops.

The NFTs were only gone for a few hours so no real harm done, aside from a bit of panic among any NFT owners who noticed their pictures had turned into error messages. But I think it's a very interesting reflection on the nature of NFTs, their impermanence, and their reliance on technology to "exist" at all. Cardillo said on April 28 that the Clone X collection had successfully migrated to Arweave, a decentralized storage system that will ensure this sort of thing cannot ever happen again.

Maybe that's true and maybe it's not—there's a distinct ring of "unsinkable" to that sort of language, which rarely ends well—but as DL News explained, it's something of an ongoing issue with NFTs and those who believe they have value. While the non-fungible tokens exist on blockchains, associated images are often stored on conventional servers, and if something happens to those servers—as was the case with Cloudflare—they, rather like the infamous apes of legend, are gone.

The site also noted that while some Clone X NFTs sold for more than $1 million at their peak, they now list for about 300 bucks each. That's not a server problem, though, that's just how it goes.

Back in 2022, the Tennis Australia's forward-thinking management released 6,776 images of tennis balls as digital NFTs. Each one sold for 0.067 in the ethereum cryptocurrency, about $278 AUD at the time. Those same NFTs are now reportedly trading for as little as 0.003ETH or $15 AUD on OpenSea, the self-described "world’s first and largest digital marketplace for crypto collectibles and non-fungible tokens (NFTs)". Ouch.

To add a little detail and context, the NFTs were linked to 19cm by 19cm plots on the courts at the Australian Open in Melbourne. At the time, Tennis Australia reportedly promised to update the metadata on the NFTs whenever a winning shot during a match landed on a given the plot.

What's more, Tennis Australia pitched the whole thing as being akin to an airline frequent flyers program, offering ground passes for finals weeks for NFT owners, so-called behind the scenes access along with tickets to matches the following year if their NFT court plot was linked to a match point. Oh, and a Discord channel for NFT owners was set up.

In 2023, Tennis Australia released a further 2,545 NFTs, again digitally depicting Australian Open tennis balls and linked to court plots, despite controversy springing from the perception of volatile cryptocurrency markets. When you add the two tranches of NFTs together, they sold for around $3 million AUD. Nice work if you can get it.

At the time, Ridley Plummer, senior manager of metaverse, NFTs, web3 and cryptocurrency at Tennis Australia, said the organization was commited to NFTs for the long term.

“We shouldn’t just put down our tools and walk away because the market’s having its challenges. There’s obviously a ton of external factors that come into play when you’re exploring a new technology like web3 and NFTs, and when you’re an innovative company like Tennis Australia and the AO there’s obviously challenges and and rewards that come with that as well,” Plummer said.

In 2024, it's thought Tennis Australia did not issue any further NFTs, though existing owners were given ground passes. For this year's tournament, currently running in Melbourne, it seems that the Australian Open isn't mentioning the NFT scheme at all or offering ground passes. The Guardian says that the Discord server has been shut down, the associated websites are "dormant" and that Tennis Australia isn't responding to "multiple requests for comment."

Thus it does rather seem that Tennis Australia and the Australian Open would rather the whole thing just disappeared. All we can say is that it doesn't seem surprising that something of little apparent value has indeed turned out to have little actual value, though in the interest of full transparency, this author doesn't get NFTs. At all.

Between the abrupt game cancellations, lay-offs, and ongoing buyout talks, Ubisoft is going through a bit of a PR storm at the moment. The beleaguered publisher could really do with something to regain a bit of goodwill, so what with neon-soaked Far Cry 3 spin-off Blood Dragon being so fondly remembered by fans (as well as Captain Laserhawk, the perfectly decent Netflix show set in the same universe), you can see why they'd look to this IP as their saviour.

Enter Captain Laserhawk: The G.A.M.E., a top-down shooter set in the Blood Dragon universe, and starring Rayman as a commentator (via Polygon). Here's the catch: it's a Web 3 game that requires you to buy an NFT to play. This NFT takes the form of your very own 'Niji Warrior' card that improves as you play the game, presumably making it gain value over time so that one day other players/NFT believers buy it off you.

As is often the case with these NFT games, all the promotion on the official site and X page (both of which are absent from Ubisoft's main social channels) focuses on the familiar NFT promises such as "A world you can shape and transform", "the chance to earn exclusive rewards of great value," and "the entire community will have the opportunity to influence the plot and participate in key decision-making moments." 

But what of the game itself? Well, Ubisoft seems to be playing the whole 'free-to-play mobile MMO' trick of concealing gameplay as much as possible, because neither the homepage trailer nor the separate trailer on 'The G.A.M.E' page show any in-game footage. In fact, browsing the site, I came across just one screenshot of what the in-game action looks like—a couple of avatars shooting each other in a plain grey arena; why is it that NFT games always look like those cheapie rush jobs that pop up every day on Steam for $5?

Ubisoft's early forays into NFTs were met with dismay from fans and French trade unions back in 2021, but that didn't stop them continuing to push into the space, last year entering a partnership with blockchain gaming platform Immutable. Clearly Ubisoft learned something from all the negative feedback around NFTs, because at least now it has the self-awareness to keep this stuff sequestered away from its main channels. 

Last week, Ubisoft baffled us all by launching Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles, an NFT tactics game, in the year of our lord 2024. Its characters cost as much as $63,000 in cryptocurrency, despite the fact that I'm not entirely sure what you can do with them once you own them. Mostly, it seems like they're good for, well, playing Champions Tactics—unless you wanted to play over the weekend, when every player found themselves connecting and immediately losing to the same guy, at the same time.

On Friday afternoon, players began appearing in the bugs-and-feedback channel of the official Champions Tactics Discord to report that ranked matches had become unplayable. They would connect to a game, only to immediately get a server error message. Despite the message saying that their "stats and ratings have not been impacted," players were watching their competitive rankings plummet as they repeatedly joined matches they'd immediately lose.

Gradually, those players all realized that in their busted game, they'd been matched to the same player: "Paulstar111." By Friday night, the Discord's users were demanding that the Champions Tactics devs ban Paulstar111, who'd somehow managed to hack the game's matchmaking and feed himself wins.

Unfortunately, one of the Discord's mods appeared with bad news: The devs weren't able to access their office over the weekend. "Hey fam. We all share the same frustrations and it's a known issue which so many of us have reported already," said moderator Unchartedblock. "Unfortunately, we have to wait until Monday for team to fix the issues."

"If this guy stay whole weekend connected doing this he doomed this game," said Discord user Ketaros in response. "GL for you guys."

Saturday morning, however, brought a welcome surprise. Game director Biloukat announced that the devs had been able to administer justice to the rogue Paulstar111. "We observed a weird behavior for this player 'paulstar111," Biloukat said. "We decided to ban him and we'll deeply investigate on his behavior on Monday!"

Sadly, as soon as Paulstar111 was struck down, his villainy reemerged by another name. Within minutes of Biloukat's announcement, players were experiencing the same instant losses as they all found themselves matching with the latest unkillable demigod: a user named "Schilleri11." Spirits had plummeted through the floor, as though pouring a bunch of fake money into a bunch of fake tactics figurines might not have been the canny investment it'd seemed.

Monday brought the strangest wrinkle yet. Biloukat returned this morning with another announcement: Matchmaking, for now at least, should be functional. Players are once again free to battle their crypto-forged tchotchkes. The sordid tale, however, had a baffling conclusion: Paulstar111 and Schilleri11 might have become unconquerable archvillains, but they hadn't known what the hell was happening either. Through no fault of their own, a networking error earned them the hatred of—well, however many people are playing Champions Tactics. Couple dozen, at least.

"We sincerely apologize to Schilleri11 and Paulstar111, as the problem was due to a matchmaking bug, and they were banned for security reasons," Biloukat said. "We have, of course, lifted their bans and kindly ask everyone to be understanding towards them."

Just in case you took this as a sign to sprint headlong into Champions Tactics yourself, it sounds like things haven't been entirely buttoned up over at Ubisoft Web3 HQ. In this morning's announcement about restored matchmaking, Biloukat asked players to "please keep in mind that the bug might reoccur" while the dev team works on a long-term solution.

The Champions Tactics marketplace seems unphased, at least. As I write this, its most expensive champion is listed at $256,570,000. After the game's first week, I can only imagine how many eager buyers are eyeing it now.

Despite the fact that we've sort of universally agreed that NFT games aren't going to happen, the nature of game development makes it so we're bound to be seeing doomed projects fly their unwanted freak flags high on the proud ship "Sunk Cost". See, videogames take a few years to make, so whatever trend was popular a few years ago will only be surfacing now, unless you're willing to go all Early Access about it (which plenty of NFT projects have).

Ubisoft has gotten a big run up and leapt onto the bandwagon already halfway to Oregon with Champions Tactics, a Web3 (that's "NFT" in tech bro speak) PVP game which, looking at this trailer, has an art department that's utterly wasted on it.

Here are the nice things I have to say about Champions Tactics: This aesthetic, a blend of Darkest Dungeon and Heroforge-style tabletop minis, is rad as all hell. Going onto the website, you can see 3D models of these things, and they all have this lovely painterly texture to them. This might be the first NFT game I actually think looks halfway good—certainly better than the weird, lifeless pseudo-anime dolls of Square Enix's Symbiogenesis.

Here are the bad things I have to say about Champions Tactics: It's an NFT game. Despite being so thoroughly, annoyingly touted as the future of game development since it surfaced circa 2015-2017, I've yet to see a single use of the tech that isn't just replicable with what we have already.

Evangelists of the stuff will tell you that you can own your own digital corner of the information highway (Second Life came out in 2003, and most MMOs have housing), or that you can trade rare items with your fellow players (TF2 and Counter-Strike have been doing this forever). Then there's this idea that you "own the item" in question more than you would otherwise (you don't, you own a certificate that's associated with it, and the item will vanish if the infrastructure does). Then there's the whole "you could use a sword from one game in another game!" nonsense, which I think we can all agree was cooked up by people who don't understand how game design works on even a fundamental level.

And this is no different. If you missed the free minting orgy back in July, the game has "Ethereal Champions" that you can temporarily play with, but if you want to actually engage with game mechanics you'll have to shell out enough cryptocurrency for some at the marketplace.

These champions range anywhere from $7 to $63,000 at the time of writing, and you just know those more expensive ones are going to dominate the meta of a PvP game, because obviously, otherwise they wouldn't be worth that much—okay, that's a little unfair. This seems to be a player-made ecosystem. The more typical price for a high-end one seems to be around $300-1,000, with which you could buy several good games instead of bragging rights over a game no-one with a normal day job cares about.

I think the biggest tragedy is how that kickass visual identity I just mentioned crumbles here. The artstyle which—again, is cool—is used to generate thousands upon thousands of randomly-assembled champions, instead of anything with any kind of spirit in it. I'm not convinced anyone's attached to "Methodic Warrior" or "Earthy Pugilist", the latter of which has a gun, by the way. The closest this gets to being conserved is in the game's factions page, outlining the film-thin lore of the setting, and I mean—look at this art, it doesn't belong here. Let me rescue you from this prison Ubisoft put you in.

I think the real tragedy here is knowing that, unless Champions Tactics somehow manages to avoid the 100% miss rate these NFT projects have had so far, all of this genuine effort is going out the window in a scant handful of years when the tokens eventually devalue and the game winds down. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, maybe Ubisoft's stumbled on some secret sauce, but this game isn't entering into a competitive genre as much as it is wading into a graveyard and yelling "I'm alive!" Ah well. At least it's not giving people skin and eye injuries.

Let's kick off with some terminology: Blockchain. Bitcoin. NFT. Web3 gaming. Provided your eyes haven't rolled so far into the back of your head you're still able to read the rest of this article, I have some terrible news for you—two new handhelds are aiming to corner the market once more on blockchain-based gaming, only this time, it's mobile.

First up we have the SuiPlay0X1, a handheld gaming device with "native Web3 capabilities", or at least, a pretty render of one (via Ars Technica). Announced proudly as "the world's first blockchain native handheld games console", the SuiPlay 0X1 is integrated with the Sui blockchain, a Layer 1 blockchain and smart contract platform.

What that means for potential buyers is handheld "Web3 gaming", which in basic terms is essentially gaming connected to a blockchain or with some cryptocurrency integration. Your in-game assets can be tracked and transferred on a blockchain, and in this case you can set up a crypto wallet tied to your handheld. Bully.

But keep your fork, crypto fans, because there's more. Hot on the heels of a sneak preview event at Paris Blockchain Week on April 7 was the Twitter announcement of the BitBoy One, a translucent orange Web3 gaming handheld (via Tom's Hardware). Developed by Ordz Games, it too makes a bold claim, in this case that it's the "world's first Web3 gaming device", and otherwise looks like a standard emulation handheld that once spent a frantic night with a Terry's Chocolate Orange.

However, there's a party trick. Despite the relatively meagre hardware inside, including the four year old Arm SoC-based Rockchip RK3566, 32GB of internal memory and 4GB of RAM, Ordz claims that not only can you use it as hardware crypto wallet, you can also earn tokens through the device by playing blockchain play-to-earn games. And as if that wasn't enough crypto in your handheld gaming experience, the creator—the mysteriously named z3th—says that you'll also be able to mine Bitcoin using the device. Very slowly.

“The mining power of the physical device is very, very weak. It will take years to mine…you’re not going to make real money from it. But it’s for fun.”

And making some real money might be a genuine concern, as the BitBoy One is expected to retail for approximately $500, which means that for a little bit more, you could buy a Steam Deck OLED. It won't make you any real money either, but at least it's got the hardware to let you play some games that don't look like they were first released in 1989.

Web3 gaming is, at its core, a pretty nebulous concept to begin with, and one that's been tried many times before, usually with catastrophic results. And amidst horrifying reveals of concepts like a "mechanism to control NFT selling pressure" and sustained internet backlash towards the concept, some companies attempted to back off from discussing the terms involved entirely.

Gamers seem to have been not just reluctant to jump on the Web3 gaming bandwagon, but outright hostile towards the concept as a whole. It's difficult to see how these two handhelds might change perceptions in this regard, unless the aim here is to bring crypto fans into the gaming space that may not have been interested otherwise.

As things stand, I'll believe in the Web3 gaming future, and indeed, these handhelds, when I see it. For now the SuiPlay0X1 seems to exist purely as a render, and the BitBoy One, while looking closer to a production unit, has the sort of hardware that you'd usually find in a much cheaper emulator device. 

Neither seem likely to set the world on fire, and as far as gaming goes, I get the sense that the vast majority of gamers will be somewhat pleased by that. Crypto and gaming have come together so far like oil and water. Nothing here seems likely to change that fact anytime soon.

The internet's honeymoon phase with NFTs has long since passed—we probably won't see them widespread in games any time soon—owing to a decline in anyone really caring about them. 

The most notable thing about 'Bored Apes' these days is that a concert blasted its poor attendants with enough UV lighting to actually injure them. Oh, and the creator of a knock-off "Mutant Ape Planet" is facing up to five years in prison. But don't worry, Disney's new "digital pins," as announced on the Disney Pinnacle Twitter account, totally aren't NFTs. Right? Right?

Turns out, yes, they are (thanks, Verge). The pins are being produced in partnership with Dapper Labs, which still believes the blockchain "will reshape how we use and interact with digital worlds", a sentence I have heard a lot. If our digital worlds do indeed get reshaped in the future, I'll eat some humble pie, but I'm not exactly holding my breath.

Granted, Dapper Labs were pulling off some big things back when NFTs were the talk of the Twitter feed. CryptoKitties—which former PC Gamer features producer Nat Clayton even mentioned in their great NFT write-up back in 2021—were being traded for a whole lot of moolah. Now a CryptoKitty is barely worth more than the cost of trading one.

Beyond turning beloved Disney characters like Mickey Mouse, Goofy, and Darth Vader into marketable cryptopins, both the announcement and the website are pretty sparce. Not to mention, devoid of the big bad NFT word. Still, if the idea of getting an ultra-rare jpeg of Donald Duck (or, well, a 3D model of a pin of him) floats your boat, you can sign up for a waitlist.

Divorced from the NFT wasteland, this doesn't seem like a silly idea on an executive meeting room whiteboard. Disneyland itself already has a pin-trading "guest activity", allowing collectors to swap their limited-edition pins (bought within the park, of course) in a controlled space.

Obviously, like anything limited-edition, people were so… 'enthusiastic' about them, Disney had to change the rules and stop organised pinheads from filling up the park benches with their illicit operations. After seeing the chaos prompted by the Pokemon Van Gogh card, nothing surprises me anymore.

Point being, there's already an established base for this sort of thing. Whether these pins'll revive the NFT market—something I'd bet against, personally—remains to be seen. Likely, it'll be swept under the rug just as Disney's doing to the term itself.

Bored Ape Yacht Club company Yuga Labs says it is "aware of the eye-related issues" suffered by attendees of the ApeFest Hong Event that took place over the weekend, and is encouraging people experiencing symptoms "to seek medical attention just in case."

ApeFest Hong Kong was a three-day event for Bored Ape and Mutant Ape owners. It was basically blockchain BlizzCon: A Mecca for NFT true believers promising community events, meetups with fellow JPG owners, "exclusive merchandise" (of course), and a series of musical events to close things out. Initially at least, it seemed that a good time was had by all, although the festive atmosphere may have been dampened now and then by moments of commiseration over the very big, ugly, obviously-this-was-going-to-happen NFT market crash.

Not long after that closing concert, however, something appeared to be not quite right with ApeFest attendees. "Anyone else’s eyes burning from last night?" Feld4014 tweeted on November 5. "Woke up at 3am with extreme pain and ended up in the ER. I saw a couple reports but just trying to figure out if there was a common thread."

It was indeed a common thread.

In a more detailed breakdown of his experience, crypto_birb said he was diagnosed with "photokeratitis," a condition that occurs when eyes are exposed to UV light. Welding without adequate eye protection can cause it (commonly known as "arc eye"), and snow blindness is another form of photokeratitis. It's basically like a sunburn of your corneas, and like sunburns, the good news is that in most cases the condition is temporary (as long as you stop doing whatever it was you were doing to cause the problem in the first place) and the bad news is that it until it clears up, it can be very painful.

Eventually, Yuga Labs acknowledged the issue via the Bored Ape Yacht Club Twitter account.

"Apes, we are aware of the eye-related issues that affected some of the attendees of ApeFest and have been proactively reaching out to individuals since yesterday to try and find the potential root causes," it tweeted on November 6, the day after reports of injuries first began to surface. "Based on our estimates, we believe that much less than 1% of those attending and working the event had these symptoms.

"While nearly everyone has indicated their symptoms have improved, we encourage anybody who feels them to seek medical attention just in case."

In a statement sent to PC Gamer, a Yuga Labs representative said it is "aware of the situation and are taking it seriously." 

"We are actively reaching out to and are in touch with those affected," the rep said. " We’re also pursuing multiple investigative lines of inquiry to learn the true root cause. 

"Based on our estimates, the 15 people we’ve been in direct communication with so far represent less than one percent of the approximately 2,250 event attendees and staff at our Saturday night event. We are not in a position to confirm the cause or speculate on how we'll avoid it in the future, until the investigation is complete."

I don't want to come off as overly critical, but 'we temporarily blinded fewer than 1% of the people who came to our show' doesn't strike me as a particularly great response to people who suffered potentially serious injuries at your event. That's especially true if your 'proactive outreach' is only targeting people who posted on social media about it: It's not clear how exactly Yuga is approaching the problem but if, more than 24 hours after the incident, it's only managed to speak to 15 of the 2,250 people at the show, at the very least I have to think that maybe it's not really seeing the whole picture. 

A rep later clarified that Yuga Labs is "reaching out to those affected, and some of those also reached out directly to us."

"We are distressed by these reports, as nothing is more important to us than the health and safety of our community, many of whom we spent significant Facetime with over the weekend—they reached out directly by DMs on social media, and we monitored other community members posts and reached out to them when we saw they had been affected," the Yuga Labs rep said. "Right now, we are continuing investigating alongside our ApeFest vendors and contractors to identify the potential source(s) of these issues. We will provide updates as we can. 

"Any impacted attendees are encouraged to reach out to us via social media DMs and share information about their experience and symptoms to assist our investigation. We are grateful for our community’s patience and cooperation, and continued good spirits about ApeFest 2023."

It will be very interesting to see what happens next but I strongly suspect, as others have suggested, that lawyers will be involved.

On the other hand, it's possible that the Bored Ape Yacht Club really doesn't see this as anything to worry about—a flash in the pan, so to speak. A couple hours after tweeting the "sorry we blinded you" message, it retweeted a video of the event that allegedly blinded people. The responses did not disappoint.

I've reached out to Yuga Labs for more information and will update if I receive a reply.

GameStop chairman Ryan Cohen was big into the crypto hype for a moment there. Now in a totally unseen turn of events, the company looks to be dropping cryptocurrency wallet support. 

But why? As we've seen time and time again, crypto investing is just such a lucrative and stable endeavour. What could Cohen possibly cite as the reason for this dismissal?

"The regulatory uncertainty of the crypto space", that's what. 

According to Bloomberg, GameStop has been keeping pretty quiet about all things crypto in recent calls with investors, and the move away from hosting wallets is likely indicative of a wider withdrawal from it's association altogether.

GameStop launched its digital wallet back in May last year in an attempt to bolster the company in an uncertain tech landscape. 

Months later, CEO Matt Furlong said in face of a bunch of layoffs that "Change will be a constant as we evolve our commerce business and launch new products through our blockchain group."

The company's share price fell 5% soon after half the staff were axed. And it looks like all that change ended up being too much for the company in the end.

Starting November this year, GameStop will remove support for its iOS and Chrome Extension wallets, meaning users will no longer be able to go through GameStop to manage their digital assets, such as NFTs and Ethereum.

The advice from GameStop following the removal of crypto wallet support, is that "all customers ensure that they have access to their Secret Passphrase by October 1, 2023. Any customer with access to their Secret Passphrase has the ability to recover their account in any compatible wallet."

We're not sure what the small print says about any unattended funds in wallets after this time, but I for one can't wait to find out in due course.

Only Up! is a game where "you have to get as high as possible." And no, not like that—it's a low-budget indie platformer about climbing to the top of a weird, floating structure made of railway tracks, giant slices of fruit, floating islands, and things far weird than that. And right now, nearly 150,000 people are watching it on Twitch.

The top channel on the Only Up! category right now belongs to xQc (and yes, that xQc, the guy who got $100 million to stream on Twitch competitor Kick less than a week ago), who at the time of writing has 71,000 people watching him play. But as you can see from the category front page, he's far from alone:

The concept of Only Up! is simple: You are Jackie, desperately trying to escape the poverty of the slum in which you live. To do so, you embark upon a journey inspired by the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk, climbing ever upward into the unknown.

"The world has definitely gone crazy, though it has never been normal, but maybe now is the chance for you," the Steam page states. "Crisis is a time for action and decisive steps… except it's scary, because every step can set you back far.

"Sometimes it is difficult to choose the right path, but do not be afraid, you can always repeat, we learn from mistakes."

Mechanically, Only Up! is quite simple. It's played from the third-person perspective, you can walk, run, jump, or mantle onto things, and you can't die: Even if you fall from miles up in the sky, you'll lose progress but not your life when you land. Predictably, it's a little janky: There are some fairly obvious clipping errors, and the voice acting is repetitive and decidedly not great. 

As suggested by the Steam store page, I could feel the game reaching for some level of profundity, but it mostly just came off as weird. At one point, for instance, I reached a disembodied train platform in the sky: Jackie said, "My grandfather worked here for 60 years, and then he died." Later, upon meeting a friendly dog, he said, "What a nice dog. Your master isn't coming back. Go find a new one." It seems clear that English isn't the first language for developer SCKR Games, but even so some of the in-game commentary struck me as bizarre.

The reaction on Steam is also "mixed," with just 65% of the user reviews coming in positive. One of the chief complaints (which I wholeheartedly agree with) is the lack of a save feature: If you quit the game or crash out, you have to start over from the beginning in a new session.

There's also unhappiness with Only Up's adjacency to NFTs. You're not buying NFTs in-game (as far as I have seen, anyway), but various images from the Goblintown NFT series, for instance, can be seen in locations throughout the game. The title of the game also appears to be a play on "Up Only," a fairly well-known phrase in the world of NFTs which among other things was the title of a once-popular NFT-related podcast. NFT app Floor also recently launched a new feature called—you guessed it—Up Only mode.

More overtly, the player character's jacket has the Goblintown logo on the back (and the name emblazoned across the front, although it's tricky to see), and there's actually a Goblintown mask you can put on at the start of the game. 

There's no visible disclosure of a connection, so most of that will probably go unnoticed by most players, but clearly there's some kind of connection, with Goblintown also now selling official, real-world Only Up! hoodies and t-shirts, at ridiculously inflated prices. I’ve reached out to Goblintown and SCKR Games to ask about the nature of their relationship.

It feels sketchy, and yet there's something about the game that’s also oddly alluring. I absolutely loathe games that are designed solely to make me angry, like Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy or the upcoming follow-up Baby Steps—I think I played Getting Over It for about five minutes before I punched my dog and formatted my hard drive—and let there be no doubt, that is absolutely what Only Up! Is all about.

But it's also kind of beautiful in its strangeness and simplicity. There are many moments where the way forward isn't clear, so I was forced to stop and examine my surroundings fairly closely, and maybe I'm seeing something that's not really there but I felt a powerful childlike fantasy vibe that really gave me that "let's just see what's around the next corner" feeling. Falling is incredibly frustrating, although it's not too hard to catch yourself on the way down if a structure is nearby, but I also found that with a little care (Only Up! also has "slow walking" and "slow motion" options, so you can really creep along if you need to), I didn't fall much at all.

I don't think it's a good game, and I have doubts about the durability of its popularity on Twitch, and there's an undeniable dodginess to the NFT aspect. Despite all that, I can see why people watch (and play) it. If you enjoy streamers who get mad and yell and scream and freak out, Only Up! definitely has the potential to set some of them off; and if you're in the mood for a quiet, simple, "what's next?" journey that may or may not make any sense when it's all over, it could be that, too.

For the record, there is an end to Only Up!: Newly-crowned king of Twitch Kai Cenat played through it from start to finish last week—a stream that, according to TwitchTrakcer, is what touched off Only Up's sudden surge in popularity.

Back in September last year, Ubisoft promised that it would only start making moves with NFTs when it had "something that gives you a real benefit". Well, I guess it thinks it's found it. The company has teamed up with a firm called Integrated Reality Labs (IRL, get it?) to produce a range of Assassin's Creed-themed "Smart Collectibles," little acrylic cubes with Assassin's Creed guys in them that are tied to NFTs. Are you excited? I'm excited.

Spotted by VGC, the NFTs attached to the cubes will be stored on the Polygon blockchain (no relation to our esteemed competitor Polygon.com, which is probably less-than-thrilled by the shared branding), and you'll be able to play with them using a downloadable app. 

It works like this: At some point in the (presumably near) future, IRL will push a limited set of AC-themed "digital souls" of varying rarities to market, letting you pick one up for reasons that are between you, your bank, your conscience, and your god.

Once you've purchased your non-fungible Ezio (or whoever else), you'll be able to rouse him from his slumber on your mobile device and customise him using IRL's "Soul Customizer,"  a theologically enterprising name for what is, in essence, a wardrobe. In there, you'll be able to "Customize your outfit, weapon, and pose" and "forge your digital soul into a unique Smart Collectible".

What's a smart collectible, I hear you ask? Why, it's your personally-customised digital soul, trapped forever in an undecaying acrylic prison. IRL will use its "proprietary 3D printing technology" to produce a dinky version of your digital guy, "embedded with a chip allowing it to be scanned and authenticated along with interactivity with the IRL companion app". You know, in case you show it off to a visiting house guest and they accuse you of trafficking in illegitimate plastic Ezios.

And then, well, you own those things forever. Congratulations. The collectibles don't appear to have any effect inside Ubisoft's games, but if you ever feel the urge, you can fire up that companion app again and compel your digital pal into a variety of "unique interactions". You'll be able to "Complete achievements and level up your account to earn and unlock items, recipes, and loot boxes". In fact, you'll even be able to unlock the stuff you need to forge more smart collectibles, should you feel the need to add to your plastic menagerie of videogame men.

Much like those Yu Suzuki Virtua Fighter NFTs from a couple of months back, it seems like Ubisoft isn't really involved in, well, whatever you'd call this beyond licensing out the Assassin's Creed brand to IRL. Nevertheless, it is—by my estimation—still quite risible, especially in the wake of the company's own comments about only trying to flog you NFTs when they'd actually be useful.

IRL hasn't said when the first digital soul drop will be, or even how much each rarity tier will cost when they're available. So, you know, just keep that tab open and keep refreshing if you're as excited as I am.

Remember back in April last year, when the UK government decided it was going to show off the "forward-looking approach" that it was "determined to take toward cryptoassets in the UK" by directing the Royal Mint to create a state-backed "NFT For Britain"? You might not, it was several prime ministers ago. Regardless, those plans have now been ditched.

Well, kind of. Economic Secretary Andrew Griffith said yesterday that "the Royal Mint is not proceeding with the launch of a Non-Fungible Token" after consulting with His Majesty's Treasury, but noted that the proposal would be kept "under review". You know, just in case NFTs suddenly become a really good idea.

Griffith didn't say what, in particular, led the Treasury and Royal Mint to jettison the national NFT idea, but that hasn't stopped other members of the government from speculating. "We have not yet seen a lot of evidence that our constituents should be putting their money in these speculative tokens unless they are prepared to lose all their money," chair of the Treasury Select Committee Harriet Baldwin told the BBC, "So perhaps that is why the Royal Mint has made this decision in conjunction with the Treasury".

Perhaps, indeed. Whatever the reason, we probably shouldn't take this as a sign that Britain's latest prime minister is a crypto-sceptic. In fact, current PM Rishi Sunak was the one who ordered the NFT's creation back when he was chancellor under Boris Johnson in 2022 and is on-record as a strong supporter of crypto and blockchain tech. It may just be the case that the government isn't keen on tooting its crypto horn too loudly with the historic collapse of FTX so fresh in everyone's memories.

But fear not, crypto stans, the UK has multiple irons in the blockchain fire right now, including a public consultation on the creation of a "digital pound," which will conclude this June. If all goes well (or not, depending on your perspective) we could see the introduction of "a new form of digital money for use by households and businesses for their everyday payments needs" in the UK: A Central Bank Digital Currency, much like the ones already being pioneered in China, Canada, and several other countries around the world. The future is now, whether we like it or not.

EVE Online maker CCP Games announced Project Awakening yesterday, a new game set in the EVE universe that threatens to "combine CCP’s 25 years of game design experience with the latest in blockchain technology." And while the reaction from various crypto pundits and people with ".eth" in their Twitter usernames was predictably bullish, swathes of the EVE Online community have responded with, well, scorn. Just pure, unbridled scorn.

The EVE Online subreddit is currently a wasteland of memes, rants, and anger about the project. Plenty of the upset revolves around blockchain as a concept: Players have been flooding the community with a series of posts with titles like "The shitposts will continue until CCP stops dealing with crypto" and "Eve Online scamming takes the next step with Blockchain". Others sarcastically recall the time CCP rejected NFTs as "Not For Tranquility" (Tranquility being the name of EVE Online's solitary game server).

"NFT stands for “Not for Tranquility” - Hilmar Veigar Pétursson 2022 from r/Eve

Meanwhile, the responses to CCP's tweet announcing the project are torn between people who say things like "Speaking for the whole web3 space: we can't wait!" and EVE players calling those people clowns. A Twitter user named Kanonenfutter summed up the reaction as "People who've never played a single hour or Eve Online thinking this is a W," predicting failure for Project Awakening and maybe even CCP as a whole unless "the blockchain technology is completely invisible to the average player."

But players are also upset by what they see as CCP's long history of pursuing boondoggles at the expense of EVE Online's development, reserving particular ire for current CEO Hilmar Pétursson. Plenty of memes poke fun at CCP's long library of cancelled and shuttered games—like World of Darkness Online and Dust 514—and accuse Pétursson of repeatedly chasing fashionable golden geese instead of focusing on fixing EVE Online's issues. 

Many feel that the $40 million CCP has raised in funding for Project Awakening would be better spent tuning up EVE: "Funny how much money they don't put into the thing that made them their money," said user mtgsyko82.

"If at first you don't succeed" from r/Eve

I've reached out to CCP to ask for comment about the EVE community's reaction to Project Awakening, and I'll update this piece if I hear back.

The EVE forums themselves are a bit more muted, but every thread about the new game posted so far has been distinctly negative in tone. One, simply titled "Blockchain Folly", is aimed directly at Pétursson: "This obsession of yours persists beyond everyone else in the world realizing things needlessly tied to blockchain are almost universally untrustworthy at best," it reads, adding "Hopefully you manage not to destroy EVE further with this your newest mistake." 

So I don't think CCP can count on many EVE players making the transition over to Project Awakening, unless it manages to put out a truly mindblowing trailer that makes us all eat humble pie about this 'blockchain' thing at some point down the road. Still, I doubt the game's failure (or even success) will determine whether EVE as a whole sinks or swims. Chipping away at the confidence and enthusiasm of EVE fans, on the other hand, could prove fatal in the long term.

Yu Suzuki, the legendary ex-Sega game designer who has yet to be apprehended for his role in creating the Shenmue series, has gotten a new gig. VGC reports that Suzuki has partnered up with Oasyx, "an NFT project developed on the Oasys gaming blockchain," to produce a series of covetable JPEGs based around the Virtua Fighter series, which he created.

The partnership means that "fans can acquire limited-edition 'VF MAYU' NFTs" of "special Virtua Fighter characters," which will be, uh, "incubated and revealed" next month. That faintly gross-sounding process will produce 1,000 Virtua Fighter NFTs—featuring "11 characters from the first three Virtua Fighter games"—for someone, somewhere to spend too much money on. They'll also "serve as a base for future Metaverse avatars," because of course they will.

It's not entirely clear what Suzuki's role in the project actually is. In a statement, he said that he is "supervising the development of OASYX’s unique worldview," which I'm not gonna pretend is a statement overburdened with meaning from where I'm sitting, and that he's "delighted to combine innovative technology in the form of blockchain-based NFTs, with three titles from the Virtua Fighter series". It sounds to me like Yu Suzuki's role in this endeavour was telling Oasyx it could Yu Suzuki's name in this endeavour. It looks like Sega hasn't done much beyond licensing out Virtua Fighter, either.

If there's a silver lining to all this, it's that Oasyx is a proof-of-stake, not proof-of-work, blockchain system. That means it doesn't require the same energy-guzzling, environment-wrecking computation power that a network like Bitcoin does. While the Virtua Fighter NFTs are eyeroll-worthy, they're at least not eating the planet. So, take comfort in that, I suppose.

Last year we said that NFTs had been successfully bullied out of mainstream games, and I still think that's true. But it's always a little dispiriting to see the swamp bubble up and spit something out like this or Square Enix's terrible-looking NFT game, even if it's not the same NFT goldrush that seemed to briefly take hold of videogame company C-suites around the world for a while. And while I understand that Suzuki has, it seems, signed a deal that rewards him for doing barely anything at all, it's sad to see once-great creators put their names to this nonsense.

The internet might have bullied NFTs out of mainstream games, but Square Enix isn't going to let a little thing like 'what players want' get in the way of its blockchain dreams. The company has released a new trailer for the upcoming Symbiogenesis, its NFT-based game that will, it threatens, feature "10,000 collectible artworks" with "real game utility".

You can find that trailer above, but don't get your hopes up. It mostly consists of shots of (what I assume to be) in-game landscapes, with pretty much no new information at all. Square Enix is way more interested in telling you about all the thousands and thousands of NFT knick-knacks you'll be able to pick up in the game than it is in actually describing what playing it will look like. So instead of speculating, let's focus on this unhinged slide from the game's Project Evaluation Report, created by "web3 game guild" LGG.

Originally spotted by GreatCheshire on Twitter, I feel like this single slide gives a better insight into the kind of slog Symbiogenesis is going to be than any of the vaguely detailed bullet points on its website. In fairness, it was put together by a third-party rather than the company itself, but Square Enix links the report in the "Official links" section of the game's Discord, and it feels like it has more thought behind it than pretty much anything we've yet seen about Symbiogenesis' gameplay or narrative so far. 

While Square Enix promises that "the main story consisting of all 6 chapters and missions can be played to the end even without having any Character NFT," it feels like the game's design process began with someone writing that "Revenue" box on a whiteboard and working backwards from there. 

Square Enix has yet to put out any proper in-game footage, the art we've seen has made heavy and obvious reuse of assets, and the gameplay section on the Symbiogenesis website (which you can find on its About page, right under several blurbs about NFTs) says you'll "Progress through the main story and missions while also unlocking the stories held by the characters," which could just about describe any game ever. 

Plenty of big games spend a lot of time thinking about monetisation, of course, and I bet more than a few of them have drawn up similarly nightmarish flowcharts. Nevertheless, there's something particularly skeevy about Symbiogenesis, which feels like its gossamer-thin gameplay layer was devised as an afterthought to justify its monetisation. Even more perplexing: the NFT market has shrunk dramatically since its heyday, so who is all this stuff even for?

Well, Square Enix executives, probably. The company looks set to replace its current, crypto-loving president with a new crypto-loving president. Takashi Kiryu, who's tipped to replace current prez Yosuke Matsuda at the company's June shareholders' meeting, previously worked at Dentsu, which is way into Web3 and blockchain stuff, where he focused on the "scouting of new and disruptive technologies". So don't expect a stop to this nonsense any time soon.

If the game's roadmap is to be believed, its first chapter (of six) will release in mid-May.

It's no secret that I depend on energy drinks and candy bars to get me through the workday, so I'm always willing to gulp down a new caffeine elixir given a chance. When I heard about a drink backed by crypto, I knew I needed to try it and see if I could taste the future. It turns out, much like a lot of blockchain-related ventures, the future tastes like a sour berry. 

The energy drink in question is Cryptoblast, available in the FOMO Fuel flavor, formally known as Berry FOMO. As a professional taste tester of novelty consumables like gamer gum and energy powders, I felt equipped to give it a verdict. It ain't great.

Upon sipping the beverage (and spilling a bunch of it in the video studio), the inside of my mouth was clobbered with an aggressive flavor I can best describe as "sort-of berry." It was tarter than the Red Bull I drank this morning and left an awful aftertaste that sat with me most of the afternoon despite my best efforts to wash down with about two liters of water.

On the plus side, CryptoBlast contains fewer calories and less sugar than a Red Bull, with nearly double the sodium and cost. Great! I spent around $20 for a case of three drinks, which amounts to just over $6 per can, which is too much for an energy drink, no matter the future earning potential. 

This leads to Cryptoblast's whole thing: it's backed by its own cryptocurrency, $CBT.  The company claims to return 30% of its net profits to its token. So if the company does well and sells tons of cans, the value of the tokens should increase, in theory. Passive income, baby!

CryptoBlast's motto is "Taste. Hold. Earn," but considering that CBT tokens are currently valued at $0.00000211, if you buy now, you'll be holding for quite a while before you can see any worthwhile return on your investment. (Assuming any of this actually happens.)

On top of the token, anyone who buys a case will receive an NFT. Currently, the company is giving away what it calls $50K worth of NFTs and a chance for one person to win 1% of the company. I tracked down a collection of CryptoBlast NFTs on OpenSea, but I haven't seen anything being bought or sold, so I couldn't tell what they go for.

It's interesting to see the performance of an actual physical product like an energy drink tied to the success or failure of a cryptocurrency, but not interesting enough to make the drink taste good, and my confidence in blockchain projects is not exactly sky-high.

It's probably not a good sign that the official CryptoBlast website is riddled with dead-end links, such as its FAQ and About CBT pages. While I'm not qualified to give financial advice, these seem like investment red flags to me.

CryptoBlast is available on Amazon at $18.95 for a 3-pack. You could also save your money and drink more water.

Another instalment in the series of life affirming Web3 downfalls, over $1.74 million has been robbed from unsuspecting, would-be cryptocurrency investors after the Azuki NFT anime world's Twitter account was hacked. That's on top of a potential $1 million worth of stolen NFTs.

Having taken over the Azuki Official Twitter account, hackers' attempted to seduce its 334,600 large fanbase with a series of posts advertising fake mints. The fanbase, consisting of anime, crypto, and bean enthusiasts, all seem in good spirits despite the attack.

In case you're wondering about the bean connection, Azuki beans are a kind of sweet red bean commonly used in Japanese cooking—a necessary piece of context for later.

Users who fell for the feat of social engineering and clicked through, attempting to mint through the fake links, had not only their entire cryptocurrency wallets drained, but many of their precious NFTs stolen. These included 74 Otherdeeds NFTs worth around $2,700 each, three Porsche NFTs worth maybe $3,100, 57 Beanz NFTs at $2,600, 12 Doodles NFTs at $10,600, and 49 Pudgy Penguins worth $9,200. Two Mutant Apes were also lost, which could sell for around $24,300 at floor price (via Web3isgoinggreat).

One user in particular is said to have lost $750,000 in USDC stablecoin from a single wallet. Tragic, really. Would have been safer to invest in real-life Azuki bean stocks.

In a thread detailing the events of the January 27 attack, Azuki officials say they "immediately reached out to our contacts at Twitter, as well as took steps to alert the community. The malicious tweets and links were taken down swiftly."

How the hack came to be is unclear, though Azuki says it's currently looking into it. "We take security seriously, and the Twitter account was secured using a 2FA Authentication app."

Somewhat appropriately, Azuki recently partnered with a clothing brand named Ambush, only for their followers to end up ambushed a little later down the line. Foreshadowing, perhaps? The least I can say about Azuki is that their stuff looks a darn sight better animated than Adata's terrible web3 anime, Xtreme Saga.

The Azuki site is truly something to behold. Saturated with a kind of Matrix inspired "take the red bean" spiel, you can journey to different parts of the world to discover stories that undoubtedly are a gateway to moneymaking schemes of the NFT variety. 

The Alley is my favourite, and almost had me in tears when the hilarious bell tune from the Teriyaki Boys' Fast & Furious Tokyo Drift theme started playing in the background. It promises potential NFT investors "many many diamonds dangling" as the original song proposes, though that seems to have fallen through here.

Sounds like just another nail in the NFT coffin.

After a couple of years of successfully selling ugly scribbles of silly apes for obscene prices to people with too much money, Bored Ape Yacht Club parent company Yuga Labs is moving into game development. And it's doing so exactly as you'd expect: Dookey Dash is a game about swimming through a sewer in pursuit of magical monkey poop. 

Here's the premise, because we might as well embrace the entirety of this ridiculousness: Jimmy, one of the Bored Apes, "took a shit so atomic he ripped a damn hole in the space-time continuum." Out of that hole stepped an ape from different universe, who handed a box and key to another Bored Ape named Curtis. A party ensued, during which Jimmy—recovered from his earlier gastrointestinal issues, I guess—swallowed the key, leading to yet more quality time on the throne.

This is where you come in. The key has exited Jimmy and entered the sewer, and it's up to you to take the plunge in pursuit, dodging all the detritus you might (and might not) find on a voyage through municipal plumbing while collecting powerful fragments left behind by the transdimensional rift. The longer you survive and the more you collect, the better your score—simple, right?

Not quite that simple. Access to Dookey Dash is limited to people with a "sewer pass," which can only be claimed by owners of a Bored Ape or Mutant Ape NFT. But anyone with a pass can play, even if they don't own one of the ape NFTs, and you can probably see where this is going: Sewer passes are being offered for sale for absolutely absurd amounts of money. 

The floor price for a sewer pass on Opensea—that is, the lowest price on auction—now stands at more than 2 ETH, which at the moment translates to nearly $3,100 in real money. That price is rising quickly: The floor price yesterday, as noted by Ars Technica, was 1.49 ETH.

And if you think those price tags will scare people off, I have news: The total volume of sewer pass sales on Opensea at this moment stands at 13,329 ETH, which works out to nearly $21 million; the highest price paid for a single pass so far is 6.2 ETH ($9,700) for a tier 4 pass—because of course there are tiers to these things, too.

The point of all this is... well, frankly it's unclear to me. Dookey Dash is actually billed as a "skill-based mint": Players have until February 8 to rack up the highest score possible, at which point everyone with a sewer pass who's played the game at least once becomes eligible for "The Summoning." 

The top score among all players gets the key that opens the box; everyone else will get a "Power Source," which is apparently another NFT, with varying traits based on their high score. 

"Your power source will be able to evolve through a sequence of various ApeCoin powered mini-games as the story continues," the video explainer states. "These power sources are your key to what comes next."

Okay, but what comes next? What's in the box? What are these power sources meant to power? I don't know. The FAQ at yuga.com isn't super helpful on that front either, saying only that summoned power sources "can be utilized in the future mini-game sets to reach the Evo 2 stage and beyond."

But as Ars pointed out, the utility of the power sources (which may or may not be somehow connected to the horrific Otherside metaverse platform) is almost irrelevant. It's all about churning money: The number of sewer passes is limited, and power sources with high scores attached will be even rarer, and in the world of NFTs that grants them the appearance of value. (Players who want to sink even more money into this can also purchase powerups to aid them on their journeys through the sewers.) So far, based on the action on Opensea, Dookey Dash appears to be doing exactly what it was meant to: Turning baseless hype into money-sucking speculation. 

Well-known crypto investor NFT God, owner of one messed up looking mutant Bored Ape NFT who they call Henry, has had all their cryptocurrency and other digital assets stolen after clicking a sponsored download link on Google for popular streaming app, OBS.

"I lost a life changing amount of my net worth" reads the top post in a thread on NFT God's Twitter account. Here, in this space where they post "Daily tips on personal growth", the thread goes into some rich narrative detail about the incident (via Web3isgoinggreat).

"I sat on the couch numb. I knew this was only the beginning. This wasn't a wallet compromise. My entire digital livelihood was under attack." After wiping everything and resetting their passwords, the post continues, "My heart raced like a Ferrari as I ran to change my substack password on my phone."

Not only had NFT God's wallets all been drained, their personal Twitter had been compromised, along with their 1% Better business account. On top of that their family, friends, and followers received messages full of phishing links to try and trick them into meeting the same fate—that includes their 16,000 Substack followers.

"My Substack means more to me than anything in my life that's not a human being. It's where I create my most deeply personal work. It's where I built my community. It's the personal achievement I'm most proud of in my life."

It's all a bit messed up how easy it is for cryptocurrency investors to have their entire livelihood bulldozed like this over a couple of small mistakes.

User @suthie86 managed to snipe NFT God's Bored Ape after it got stolen, and it looks like Henry is now home safe with his owner. I believe that transaction was around 16.65 ETH ($25,800 at time of writing), which is essentially the price Dr. 1% Better over here paid originally. No ransom going on here then.

Subsequent posts on NFT God's 1% Better account seem to nod to the recent turmoil. "There's only one way to guarantee growth: Discomfort." 

So perhaps they've learned something from the experience at least.

Pokémon Card Game—not to be confused with the Pokémon Trading Card Game—isn't a real game. It's malware disguised as a Pokémon NFT game that's designed to fool unsuspecting Pocket Monster fans into clicking on a compromising link. This malicious Fakémon installs remote control software on infected computers, which hackers can then use to access private user data and make your PC susceptible to more malicious attacks.

According to cybersecurity analysts at ASEC, via bleepingcomputer, hackers went as far as creating a pretty convincing fake website for their fake game and even a fake marketplace where you can claim and mint Pokémon Card NFTs. The fake site offers no real Pokémon NFTs, however, just headaches. 

Clicking on the "Play on PC" button on the website (which we won't link for obvious reasons) downloads an installer that, instead of installing a game, buries a tool called NetSupport Manager deep into your files. This essentially opens a back door into your PC.

To make matters worse, the malicious download has an official-looking Pokémon icon and file information, which would make it easy to convince someone who just downloaded the file, especially a young user, to open it. At the time of this post, the fake website for the Pokémon Card Game is still live.

This scam is convincing because a Pokémon NFT card game sounds like something that could be a real thing, given the popularity of Pokémon and NFTs. Nintendo expressed tepid interest in NFTs and the metaverse during a Q&A last year and hasn't announced any NFT games, but a good fake could still fool someone who doesn't keep up with the news. 

Hackers will always try to find creative ways to get you to click on a bad link. Whether it's a convincing pop-up ad or a strange email thread you've been CC'd on, play it safe and don't click on anything. Except this link. That one's totally safe.

Logan Paul is one of the world's most popular and high-profile influencers, and has now apologised to one intrepid reporter as well as the fans who 'invested' in one of his projects: a crypto-based videogame called CryptoZoo. Paul claimed to have spent "about one million" dollars of his own money on the development of CryptoZoo and described it as "a really fun game that makes you money" but, after the website's launch in 2021, the promised game never arrived, and the items sold for it are worthless.

This is web3 of course, so the fact that CryptoZoo the game would never materialize didn't stop Paul and the developers selling NFTs of cartoon eggs and in-game cryptocurrency (called $ZOO) to his fanbase. Eggs could be bought with $ZOO or Ethereum and the promise was that, when the game came along, each of these eggs would hatch into a random animal with (Paul's term) "handcrafted" art.

These animals would, goes the pitch, passively earn $ZOO for the player, and could be combined to create new hybrid animals. Animals could also be 'burned' (charming) which would feed back $ZOO to the player.

In the first 24 hours of these eggs being on-sale, people spent $2.85 million on them. The 'hatch day' was announced as 3 November 2021. And on that day the eggs did begin to hatch, only instead of the in-game animal NFT models people were expecting, the animals were more… stock photographs. The hybrid animals were stock photographs merged.

Even more importantly, CryptoZoo as any kind of gaming ecosystem did not exist: there were no games to play, and no way in which these animal images could be used. At least there's the passive income, right?

"There was no way to claim your yield", said Rob, a victim of the scam who lost over $7,000. "There never was."

The project attracted the attention of Coffeezilla, a youtuber who undertook a lengthy investigation into Paul and CryptoZoo, uncovering a whole host of shady characters along the way and attracting some vague legal threats from Paul's manager for his trouble. The first part of his investigation is embedded below, and here's part two and part three: it is exemplary work on pulling something like this apart.

Paul first spoke about the project on August 18 2021, during an episode of his podcast ImPaulsive, and many of the victims interviewed in Coffeezilla's videos say this show is where they first heard of CryptoZoo

"We have a massive team behind it and are probably out of pocket like a million," said Paul in 2021, "just because we believe in it's going to work."

Paul would repeat this claim several times but, when the project began to turn sour, he would later say that the lead developer of the project had absconded with the game's code and was demanding $1 million for its return. In Coffeezilla's video he tracks down this individual, referred to as Z, who says he did withhold code but for a very different reason.

"He literally never paid me anything at all, ever," said Z. "I never [got] paid. And you know got to a point when I was working on it and I just realised they're just going to try and steal all of my work and not pay me.

"So I took all the source code private, and I just spent like a month trying to negotiate and get something figured out where I would finally get paid. Because like on my end I have a team of 30 engineers, I'm burning $50,000 a week on building this thing, and the only thing they brought to the table were a bunch of photoshopped jpegs."

Z says they eventually worked out a settlement, while other developers who worked on the project also claim they weren't paid what was promised. This is at least partly their fault, however, as it turns out much work was done on the basis of verbal agreements that were never formalised.

The main thing, though, is that those who've invested in CryptoZoo have bought a pup. The product that was promised doesn't exist, and given that the NFT animals are currently altered photographs it's hard to see how they will ever exist in a game setting. No-one is going to make any money on this thing, except the people who sold the $ZOO and NFT eggs.

Coffeezilla's investigation leaves little doubt that something extremely dodgy went on here, and the inclusion of the words "scam" and "fraud" across the three video titles (which collectively have been viewed over 13 million times) seemed to finally spark Paul out of his quietude.

In a rebuttal video posted last Thursday, an angry Paul attempts to rebut the version of events given in Coffeezilla's video, and claims that the project fell apart because he hired "conmen" and "felons". But, Paul says, it wasn't his fault. He then says Coffeezilla is "a lopsided journalist with an agenda", has the facts wrong, and threatens to sue the reporter: always a good look. This video also includes a claim that the CryptoZoo project was somehow still alive.

At the weekend, this video was deleted (though Paul's tweet remains live), and Paul executed a complete U-turn.

Paul called the reporter to apologise and withdraw his legal threats. On the CryptoZoo Discord he made this post:

"I deleted my initial response to Coffee’s series," said Paul. “It was rash and misaligned with the true issue at hand, so I called him today and apologized…I’m grateful he brought this to light. I will be taking accountability, apologizing, and coming forward with a plan in the near future".

The CryptoZoo website says it is "undergoing upgrades to the core infrastructure of the ecosystem", but the game's marketplace remains live.

This is far from the first brush with controversy for Paul. The influencer faced enormous pushback after posting a video in 2017 which showed the body of someone who had apparently committed suicide in Japan's Aokigahara forest, for which Paul later apologised. He was also involved pre-CryptoZoo in promoting a cryptocurrency called Dink Doink, which can now fairly be described as a shitcoin.

Nevertheless, Paul's career goes from strength-to-strength. He is the face and moneymaker for a whole host of projects, from the Prime drinks to high-profile boxing matches against the likes of Floyd Mayweather, and recently signed a contract with World Wrestling Entertainment.

Paul also continues to exhibit some truly deplorable behaviour, the latest example being a mini pig he'd bought in the mistaken belief it would stay the same size. It is not known what the chain of ownership was, but what was once his pig ended up abandoned and being rescued from appalling conditions by an animal sanctuary called The Gentle Barn.

The animal is now apparently thriving, but clearly it's onetime owner couldn't run a crypto zoo or a real one.

During Coffeezilla's investigation he speaks to many victims of CryptoZoo, who lost amounts ranging from the low thousands of dollars to, in one unfortunate individual's case, over half-a-million. As ever with crypto, the victims are normal people who believed the wrong person. And it might be easy to laugh at someone who'd buy into the Logan Paul brand, but don't kid yourself: when people see this guy as bankable, they're not wrong. He is box office and, for as long as we've had celebrities, we've had celebrity endorsements.

In this case, at least, it looks like the wider ecosystem and one dogged reporter's work will ensure Paul's feet are held to the fire. The influencer's Twitter feed is now back to shilling his hugely popular Prime beverages, so normal service has resumed there, but whether Paul (estimated net worth: $35-50 million) will indeed "make this right" for CryptoZoo's victims remains to be seen.

If you thought NFT buffoonery was over in 2022, think again. Mutant Ape Planet NFTs founder Aurelien Michel, a French national living in the UAE, was arrested at JFK Airport in New York over an alleged $2.9 million rug pull—a crime he allegedly says was perpetrated because "the community went way too toxic."

According to the criminal complaint (spotted by web3isgoinggreat) that was unsealed last week, Michel allegedly performed a "rug pull" on the buyers, promising benefits and rewards for their NFT purchases but running off with the money after selling out the collection. 

“As alleged, Aurelien Michel perpetrated a ‘rug pull’ scheme—stealing nearly $3 million from investors for his own personal use. Purchasers of Mutant Ape Planet NFTs thought they were investing in a trendy new collectible, but they were deceived and received none of the promised benefits," wrote Ivan J. Arvelo, Special Agent in Charge of Homeland Security Investigations. 

The 16-page complaint claims that Michel made "false representations of, amongst other things, giveaways, tokens with staking features, and merchandise collections." The District Attorney of NY alleges that once the NFTs were sold out, _____ "ceased communications and withdrew purchasers’ funds from the company’s cryptocurrency wallets, lining his pockets with nearly $3 million of investors’ money."

Michel allegedly admitted to defrauding users in the official MAP Discord under the username '"James", saying, "We never intended to rug [pull], but the community went way too toxic."

"Michel can no longer blame the NFT community for his criminal behavior," said IRS special agent Thomas Fattorusso. "His arrest means he will now face the consequences of his own actions.”

As a side note, Mutant Ape Planet has no relationship with Bored Ape Yacht Club, a different set of monkey-themed NFTs.

If you are a victim of this scam, you call the HSI Tip Line at 1-866-347-2423.

If you aren't in the loop when it comes to web3 tarnished, tech-brand anime, you should probably save yourself and close this tab now. XPG just dug its NFT hole a little deeper at CES 2023 with a full PC setup based around the main character of its own terrible anime.

A while back, the Adata subsidiary brand came out with Xtreme Saga. It's a story of a strong female protagonist kicking butt and preaching about hope, justice, leadership, and empathy. While that may sound epic, sadly the concept was never done justice. 

That's not just as the company doesn't seem to be aware that anime is short for "animation," something that doesn't seem to have translated from the janky slideshow that is Xtreme Saga (see video below). What's worse is that the show is a guise for XPG's web3 antics. 

Its purpose? To shill NFTs, of course. 

And even as the XPG Xtreme Saga Fan Club's Ether value sits at just $8,760, with only 581 holding, the company still decided to go ahead and bring out a full PC setup including peripherals, mousepad, and even a PC case designed around its main character, Mera.

Here's what XPG showed off at CES 2023:

• Valor Air chassis
• Precog S headset
• Slingshot gaming mouse
• Mage gaming keyboard
• Battleground L mousepad

Some of the features listed include a "flashy design," "optimal dimensions," and "red mechanical" key switches. The designs are also plastered with the same signature orangey red as Mera's hair. Firey.

I am so sorry to the artists that got dragged into this farce—I hope you were paid well because having to watch the first episode of Xtreme Saga very nearly made me turn in my weeb badge.

It might as well have been a Manga, honestly.

But enough about the terrible anime frontage. The real stickler is that the gear isn't newly designed at all, other than the mousepad it's just sort of... old stuff coloured red. I have no idea how to sign this off. I'm too busy washing my eyes out with soap.

Happy new year, writes the president of Square Enix in a new letter, and now let me tell you all about the blockchain. The wider industry, or the respectable side of it at least, remains deeply sceptical of the value added to games by web3 technologies, but there are a few big outliers such as Ubisoft (which last year launched an ill-fated NFT experiment) and above all Square Enix.

The huge Japanese publisher stands out not because of its interest, but because of how bullish it is about the future incorporation of these technologies. Some necessary context for western readers is that the company has some successful mobile-oriented titles in Japan that do use such technologies, so when it's talking about use cases it already has them.

The letter from Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda begins by wishing everyone a happy new year before outlining some of the problems the world faced in 2022, including "soaring inflation", the Russian invasion of Ukraine, stock prices plunging (especially in the tech sector), and the "dramatic depreciation of the yen [ballooning] prices on imported raw materials". The macroeconomic environment ain't great, in other words, though Matsuda expects "conditions to ameliorate in the early spring".

Matsuda briefly addresses the sale of three studios—Crystal Dynamics, Eidos-Montréal, and Square Enix Montréal—plus various IP to the Embracer Group in August of last year. He writes that the goal was to "further concentrate our resources" as development becomes more complex, as part of which the publisher is on a massive hiring push for internal talent. This is put in a wider context of Square Enix believing its western and Japanese divisions operated independently of one another, whereas now it aims to be "One Square Enix".

Now the bad news. Matsuda writes about the future opportunities Square Enix sees in the industry. The publisher apparently has "three focus investment fields" and "among those, we are most focused on blockchain entertainment, to which we have devoted aggressive investment". Matsuda acknowledges the "volatility" in crypto markets and the "somber string" of news stories about blockchain businesses, "including the scandalous bankruptcy filing of FTX in November".

The macro picture with a lot of these crypto disasters is that national regulators are waking up to the space, and Matsuda says "we hear rumblings from some countries of early moves to regulate such businesses more strictly". This is not yet the case in Japan, however, where in June 2022 that government signed-off on the 'Priority Policy Program for Realizing a Digital Society' which includes guidance about web3 technologies, NFTs and blockchains.

Matsuda's saying that Square Enix recognises there's some dodgy stuff here, and 2022 was a very bad year for web3 technologies, but it still thinks this is a part of the future. And unlike many crypto enthusiasts, as part of this it's looking forward to "the creation of rules and a more transparent business environment" around blockchain stuff.

Then there's a slightly weird bit of the letter where it feels like Matsuda's maybe had a sip of the Kool Aid, and indeed he's returning to a theme already raised in last year's letter. "If we consider traditional gaming to have been centralized, then blockchain gaming must operate based on a self-sustaining decentralized model," writes Matsuda. "It is that concept, that philosophy that I see to be key."

Your guess is as good as mine. But then, all I want from Square Enix is another Parasite Eve.

Matsuda does at least say that he sees the conversation around blockchain moving from where it was in 2021, which is to say driven by speculative investment, where the premise was that first-and-foremost these technologies were about monetisation. But thanks to the wider turbulence in crypto markets "there is now a trend to view blockchain technology as a mere means to an end and to discuss what needs to happen to achieve the end of delivering new experiences and excitement to customers".

Which, given that Square Enix seems to be all-in on this stuff, is at least a more positive approach. It's arguable that these technologies could offer desirable functionality for games, by for example tracking every individual weapon in a massively multiplayer game, but the only examples we're seeing at the moment have the tech front-and-center rather than doing something useful in the background.

Square Enix currently has "multiple blockchain games based on original IPs under development", will unveil some more this year, and is looking to invest in businesses creating interesting blockchain stuff. 

2023 marks 20 years since the merger of Square and Enix, a partnership that yoked-together arguably the two greatest JRPG studios there were and has proven enormously successful. The company has continued to make great games, with perhaps the current jewel in the crown being the ongoing success and vibrancy of Final Fantasy XIV.

Square Enix's attraction to the blockchain does reflexively give one the jitters, but at least it recognises that the functionality for the player must come first if stuff like this is to be incorporated into games. Players don't like these technologies as they currently exist, and with good reason. Square Enix does seem to be suggesting that, in the future, you might enjoy one of their games built on such tech: but without ever realising it's in the background.

The internet is a maelstrom of talking—even brief exposure is liable to make you wish everyone would just shut up—but does any of it matter? Does the chorus of social media critics actually do anything? This is the internet's greatest insecurity. Self-conscious social media users diagnose each other with poster's disease and sarcastically cheer "we did it, Reddit" to express that, no, posting on the internet didn't save the day.

Internet mobs have certainly caused some things, though, for better and worse. The anger around loot boxes was at least somewhat responsible for gaining the attention of politicians, leading to the ongoing decline of the practice today. We got them to change ugly movie Sonic into boring movie Sonic. I wonder also where the absence of an internet mob has been felt: Had CS:GO keys and the Steam Community Market been met with the kind of resistance Valve saw when it tried to add paid mods to Steam, how would things be different today?

That brings me to the question I want to pose here: Are game publishers backing away from NFTs because they don't see value in them, or because they get ruthlessly mocked and harangued online every time they talk about them?

As an example, in late 2021, Discord CEO Jason Citron teased NFT integration for the chat app, and thousands of people replied to say "no thanks" in a range of less-polite tones; the most-shared responses suggested canceling Discord Nitro subscriptions. Two days and thousands of comments later, Citron said that the screenshot was just an "internal concept" that the company had no plans to implement, and that he'd share more soon. He has yet to share more, although perhaps he's just biding his time. 

Stalker studio GSC Game World, Worms developer Team17, and voice actor Troy Baker also walked back involvement with NFT projects after being yelled at online. After suggesting that NFTs are "the future" of gaming in 2021, EA CEO Andrew Wilson later clarified (after a great deal of internet shit talking) that he was just talking about collectability in general. Back in April, Blizzard president Mike Ybarra said that "no one is doing NFTs" at the studio in response to an Activision Blizzard survey designed to gauge public interest in them—I'm guessing the company got its answer. 

Ubisoft is one of the few big companies that actually made it to execution. Undeterred by comments such as "this remains the stupidest and most pointless thing in the god damn world," the publisher gave non-fungible goodies a brief try in Ghost Recon Breakpoint. Today, those NFTs are worthless, Breakpoint isn't being updated anymore, and Ubisoft now says it was all just a research project, not to be taken too seriously.

Maybe the internet's anti-NFT rhetoric is just shoving mainstream game companies toward the perspective on NFTs they would've taken anyway: Curious but cautious, especially after all the scams and thievery seen over the past couple years, the instability of cryptocurrency markets, and the lack of mainstream interest in actually buying them. Ubisoft may be telling the truth when it says it was just mucking around: If it had really been all-in on profiting from NFTs, would it have started with gun skins for one of its least-popular games?

There are lots of pro-NFT commenters online, too, and not every traditional game publisher has been dissuaded. Among the most bullish has been Square Enix, which in November somewhat quietly announced Symbiogenesis, a "digital collectible art project" made not for Square Enix fans, but for "Web3 fans." It smells of Ubisoft's half-heartedness.

Beneath the common complaints that they're environmentally costly and more or less stupid, I think NFTs inspire so much repulsion on social media because they seem to corrupt something that people actually do want. Sameness is everywhere in this era of mass production, and what started on assembly lines was near-perfected by computers, which can duplicate data near-instantly. From that perspective, the scarcity and uniqueness of NFTs might be seen as subversive: They're pushing against the current of history. It feels like something could be cool about that, somehow. But not thishow. While individual NFTs are unique, the obvious goal of corporations is to do what they always do and mass produce that uniqueness. The majority of NFTs are just another kind of mass-made plastic tchotchke, or commemorative gold coin like the ones sold on TV at 2 am. They contain nothing that's good about handmade, one-of-a-kind items; all they do is irradiate the concept with high-grade art collector snobbery and Beanie Baby-style financial speculation. What is a "Web3 fan" but a fan of buying and owning things? Isn't this about art?

Most of the time I think it's just a fad, but now and then I'll come across the preaching of some passionate Web3 believer and start to wonder if I'm losing it. Do I want to make money by playing videogames? The thought makes me want to turn off my monitor forever, but I guess I did also say that iPads were a stupid idea, and then Apple sold 300,000 of them on the first day. But then, iPads are real things, and none of this seems real. Remember that NFT guy who claimed he burned a Frida Kahlo drawing? Or when Seth Green's ape was stolen, and then he pleaded for its return as if it were a kidnapped child? Why hasn't anyone said "just kidding?" If NFTs are actually a transformative technology, how come I exclusively hear about their virtues from meme-brained financial gurus and uncool celebs like Tom Brady?

I think the internet's NFT bullying has had an effect on mainstream game publishers: If we'd all just shrugged, they'd have tried way more NFT gun skins by now. Even if it hasn't, though, maybe making fun of stuff online is something we do for each other, to remind us all of what's real and validate the overwhelming feeling that it's all very stupid. And I think that's beautiful.

The internet did a commendable job of mocking NFTs to death, or at least into remission—big game developers like Ubisoft who initially showed interest have mercifully stopped bringing them up—and now some hope that the "make it so uncool no one will touch it" tactic can be used to stunt another trend: the rapidly-advancing AI image generators spitting out flattering, fake portraits of our friends and stills from imaginary David Lynch Warhammer films.

I think they'll be disappointed. AI "art" isn't going anywhere.

In one sense, NFTs and AI art are opposites: NFTs promise that every piece of digital artwork can be a unique and valuable commodity, whereas AI art promises to eradicate the value of digital art by flooding the internet with an endless supply of it. If Jimmy Fallon wants to hoard all those stupid NFT ape pictures, I don't think most people would care, but the cheap, rapid generation of AI images has made it hard not to see more and more of them. If you've used social media over the past year, you've seen AI-generated imagery.

And I highly doubt it's a temporary fad. Where blockchain investing is criticized as pointless waste generation, AI art is lamented for threatening the jobs of illustrators. Everyone can see the value of a machine that turns words into pictures. It's hard to resist giving it a try, even if you don't like it on principle. If someone tells you they have a machine that can make a picture of anything, how can you not want to test the claim at least once?

The way we interact with these machine learning algorithms reminds me of the way people tease babies, delighting at their every response to new stimuli and pointing at anything that could be taken as a sign they've understood us. When an image generator seems to "get" what we've asked for, a pleasantly uncanny feeling arises—it's hard to believe that a computer program successfully translated a complex idea like "John Oliver looking lovingly at his cabbage having realized he's falling in love" into an image, but there it is, undeniably on the screen in front of us.

And that's really what makes AI art so offensive to so many, I think. It's not just the automation of work, but the automation of creative work, that feels so obscene. Something perceived as profoundly human has been turned into a party trick.

The good and bad news for humankind is that the sleight of hand is easily found: Image generators don't do anything unless they're trained on stacks of human-made artwork and photos, and in some cases that's been done without consent from the artists whose work was used. Indeed, the popular Lensa AI portrait maker frequently reproduced garbled signatures: the mangled corpses of the real artists who were fed to it.

An early attempt to save AI art from this criticism is easily dismissed, if you ask me. The claim goes that by scraping online artist portfolios for training material, AI art generators are "just doing what human artists do" by "learning" from existing artwork. Sure, humans learn in part by imitating and building on the work of others, but casually anthropomorphizing algorithms that crawl millions of images as living beings who are just really fast at going to art school is not a position I take seriously. It is entirely premature to grant human nature to silicon chips just because they can now spit out pictures of cats on demand, even if those pictures occasionally look like they could be human-made. 

Beyond flattering portraits

What's interesting about AI-generated images to me is that they usually don’t look human-made. One way the inhumanity of machine learning manifests is in its lack of self-consciousness. AI art generators don't tear up their failures, or get bored, or become frustrated by their inability to depict hands that could exist in Euclidean space. They can't judge their own work, at least not in any way a human can relate to, and that fearlessness leads to surprising images: pictures we've never seen before, which some artists are using as inspiration.

Rick and Morty creator Justin Roiland toyed with AI art generation in the making of High on Life, for instance, telling Sky News that it helped the development team "come up with weird, funny ideas" and "makes the world feel like a strange alternate universe of our world."

Image generation is only one way machine learning is being used in games, which are already full of procedural systems like level generators and dynamic animations. As one example, a young company called Anything World uses machine learning to animate 3D animals and other models on the fly. What might a game like No Man's Sky, whose procedurally generated planets and wildlife stop feeling novel after so many star system jumps, look like after another decade of machine learning research? What will it be like to play games in which NPCs can behave in genuinely unpredictable ways, say, by "writing" unique songs about our adventures? I think we'll probably find out. After all, our favorite RPG of 2021 was a "procedural storytelling" game.

Valid as the ethical objections may be, machine learning's expansion into the arts—and everything else people do—currently looks a bit like the ship crashing into the island at the end of Speed 2: Cruise Control. 

Users of art portfolio host ArtStation, which Unreal Engine and Fortnite-maker Epic Games recently purchased, have protested the unauthorized use of their work to train AI algorithms, and Epic added a "NoAI" tag artists can use to "explicitly disallow the use of the content by AI systems." But that doesn't mean Epic is generally opposed to AI art. According to Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, some of its own artists consider the technology "revolutionary" in the same way Photoshop has been.

"I don't want to be the 'you can't use AI' company or the 'you can't make AI' company," Sweeney said on Twitter . "Lots of Epic artists are experimenting with AI tools in their hobby projects and see it as revolutionary in the same way as earlier things like Photoshop, Z-Brush, Substance, and Nanite. Hopefully the industry will shepherd it into a clearer role that supports artists."

It is of course possible to train these algorithms without gobbling up other people's artwork without permission. Perhaps there's a world where artists are paid to train machine learning models, although I don't know how many artists would consider that better. All kinds of other anxieties arise from the widespread use of AI. What biases might popular algorithms have, and how might they influence our perception of the world? How will schools and competitions adapt to the presence of AI-laundered plagiarism?

Machine learning is being used in all sorts of other fields, from graphics tech like Nvidia DLSS to self-driving cars to nuclear fusion, and will only become more powerful from here. Unlike the blockchain revolution we keep rolling our eyes at, machine learning represents a genuine change in how we understand and interact with computers. This ethical, legal, and philosophical quagmire has just started to open up: It'll get deeper and swampier from here. And our friends' profile pics will get more and more flattering.

Has anything good ever come from NFTs? Aside from the Christopher Moltisanti meme, I mean. I really can't think of anything. The functionality they offer games is technically different than what's been available for years through conventional microtransaction sales, but it's practically the same thing for those who don't play games to be financial speculators, and the whole business of making, buying, and selling them is awash in corruption and criminality. "A useless, costly, ecologically mortifying technology," is how French trade union Solidaires Informatique described it, and I have no notes.

Myself, I have a pretty simple approach to the whole thing: No fucking thanks. It's served me well so far, because I haven't been hosed out of any money by fast-talking scammers hawking bad clipart, nor have I missed out on any gaming experiences that could be described as even remotely compelling. Tfue cards? Tiny little numbers on my Tom Clancy helmet? Atari? No thanks. See, it's easy.

Somehow, though, it keeps on happening. Money goes in, and for a variety of reasons—criminality, incompetence, the fact that NFTs are inherently valueless digital ephemera no different than the horse armor that set the gamer world ablaze with outrage in 2006—heartbreak comes out. 2022 was no exception.

Blockverse goes bust

Blockburst, an unofficial play-to-earn Minecraft game sells out its initial NFT offering, then splits

The year started off with a bang, although it was really more of a poof: In February, Blockverse, an unofficial play-to-earn Minecraft NFT game, disappeared with more than $1.2 million, just a couple days after selling out its initial offering of 10,000 NFTs in under eight minutes. Blockverse founders surfaced a few days later to proclaim that all was well, everything was fine, and there was nothing to worry about, but of course there was plenty to worry about. A promise that development would soon "get back on track" never materialized, and neither did the money.

Axie Infinity forgets to change the code

Hackers affiliated with North Korea take advantage of a security lapse to make off with $617 in crypto

Blockverse's million-dollar rug pull would look like chump change just a month later, when an Axie Infinity techno-botch enabled hackers to make off with more than $617 million in cryptocurrency. It's complicated, but the short analogy version is that after an NFT giveaway promotion, somebody forgot to change access permissions, and shortly thereafter, a shitload of money went out the door. 

It was a screwup, not a rug pull, but the net result was the same: A lot of people lost a lot of money because some unscrupulous d-bag decided he wanted it. The US government eventually pointed the finger at North Korea; some of the stolen funds were reimbursed and Axie Infinity eventually returned to action, but the token price now sits well below where it was prior to the heist. 

F1 Delta Time runs out of gas

F1 Delta Time, one of the first NFT games, loses its license, players lose their cars

F1 Delta Time did not fall victim to either a rug pull or incompetence, but it did demonstrate the inherent worthlessness of NFTs. It launched in 2019 as one of the first-ever licensed NFT games, and actually produced the "most expensive NFT" of that year, a diamond-encrusted F1 car (actually just a fairly low-quality rendering of one) called 1-1-1. But in March 2022, F1 Delta Time closed after losing its F1 license, and those NFTs were basically gone. Developer Animoca offered different sorts of compensation for the now-useless "assets," including "proxy assets" that "will be used in the future to obtain NFTs to products across the REVV Motorsport ecosystem." But given that the whole raison d'être of NFTs is digital permanence, you'd be forgiven for wondering, well, "Dude, where's my car?"

Untamed Isles sinks into the sea

The crypto-crash brings down crowdfunded MMO Untamed Isles, and there's no money left for refunds

The crowdfunded MMO Untamed Isles was a major success on Kickstarter, where it pulled in more than four times its goal of NZ$200,000 ($127,000). It had somewhat less success in the real world. In August, developers put the project "on hiatus," blaming the 2022 crypto-crash for their woes. Naturally, there was no money left over for refunds, either, which resulted in some seriously unhappy feedback from backers on Kickstarter. Developer Phat Loot Studios said it was "looking at ways to salvage both the core studio and the game so that it can be completed and released," but there's been no further update since then on the Untamed Isles website, Kickstarter, or Steam page.

CNN closes the Vault

CNN ends its Vault NFT program, abandoning its promise of "exclusive CNN perks" and the ability to mint your own NFTs based on CNN articles

CNN's Vault NFT program, launched in June 2021, offered "digital collectibles" that were essentially jpgs of "key historical moments" drawn from its archives. It also offered a built-in system to buy and trade (ie, make money on) its NFTs, through "a variety of selling formats including both open editions and limited editions." But in October, it said goodbye to the whole thing, leading to widespread cries of "rug pull" from NFT owners. It wasn't, in the strictest sense, because the NFTs are still around: You bought an NFT, you got an NFT. But other parts of the shutdown are sketchier: The 2022 roadmap, which is still accessible on the Vault website, teased everything from a new Photography for Change series of NFTs to "exclusive CNN perks for Vault collectors" and the ability to mint NFTs based on any CNN article you want—all of which went away without warning.

Seth Green's apes gone, then home again

Seth Green falls for a scammer and then pays $300,000 to get one of his stupid ugly apes back

Seth Green, who among other things is known to gamers as Normandy pilot Jeff "Joker" Moreau in the Mass Effect games, pulled his own rug in June when he spent nearly $300,000 to reclaim ownership of a Bored Ape NFT that he'd been scammed out of the previous month. I can't imagine ever being wealthy enough to drop the price of a Ferrari on a low-quality monkey scribble, but if I am, I hope I have enough taste (or basic common sense) not to.

40,000 years in prison

Alleged NFT rug-puller faces a prison sentence long enough to encompass the entire Warhammer 40,000 timeline

The collapse of crypto exchange Thodex in April 2021 resulted in losses of more than $2.5 billion, and its founder, Faruk Fatih Özer, buggered off to Albania with millions of dollars stolen from the company. He was eventually busted and ordered extradited to Turkey to stand trial. If convicted, he's facing up to 40,564 years in prison, which according to my calculations means he might be out just in time to take part in the 14th Black Crusade.

Remember at the beginning of this year when Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon made us all suffer through an asinine 77-second bit about their Bored Ape NFTs? (And yes, believe it or not, that was this year.) It was awkward and awful, although it did inspire some great reactions on social media, including one that predicted "if anyone can kill NFT culture, it's Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton."

Now, as 2022 draws to a close, that prediction may be close to coming true, indirectly at least. Fallon, Hilton, and others who have used their celebrity to promote NFTs are facing a proposed class action lawsuit accusing them of fraud. The list of defendants in the suit, available via The Hollywood Reporter, is lengthy to say the least: It also includes Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Madonna, Justin Bieber, Gwyneth Paltrow, Serena Williams, Post Malone, Snoop Dogg, Kevin Hart, Steph Curry, DJ Khaled, Adidas, a pile of other people who names I don't recognize, and of course Yuga Labs, the parent company of the Bored Ape Yacht Club.

"The Company presents the Bored Ape ecosystem as a brand that is organically beloved by some of the most famous celebrities in the world," the lawsuit states. "But the truth is that the Company’s entire business model relies on using insidious marketing and promotional activities from A-list celebrities that are highly compensated (without disclosing such), to increase demand of the Yuga securities by convincing potential retail investors that the price of these digital assets would appreciate and that, as members of 'the club,' these investors would be given exclusive access to additional financial products and benefits."

The lawsuit alleges that all of the Bored Apes action over the past year was in fact "a vast scheme" between Yuga Labs, "a highly-connected Hollywood talent agent" named Guy Oseary, and MoonPay, a company that "purports to be a white-glove service designed to help the super-rich and celebrities buy NFTs" but is in fact, according to the lawsuit, "a covert way to compensate the promoter defendants" without disclosing it to investors.

Naturally, the scheme worked: The endorsements increased both the interest in and the price of Bored Ape NFTs, the suit claims, "causing investors to purchase these losing investments at drastically inflated prices."

Much of the suit actually turns on MoonPay, the NFT acquisition service, which numerous defendants had previously invested in. For instance, the lawsuit notes a segment that took place in a November 2021 episode of The Tonight Show, in which Fallon—the host—announced that he had purchased his first NFT through MoonPay during an interview with NFT artist Mike "Beeple" Winkelmann. The suit alleges that Fallon and Winkelmann were in fact "recruited and paid" to promote MoonPay and Bored Apes during the show; it also says that Winkelmann is "direct business partners" with Oseary, the high-powered talent agent, at another NFT company.

"Fallon did not disclose that he had a financial interest in MoonPay or that he was likewise financially interested, directly or indirectly, in the increased sale and popularity of Yuga securities," the suit claims. "Nor did EHD [Electric Hot Dog, Fallon's production company] or Universal disclose that this purportedly organic segment on the Tonight Show was in reality a paid advertisement for the BAYC collection of NFTs and MoonPay by two celebrities (Fallon and Winkelmann) who are business partners with an investor (Oseary) in both Yuga and MoonPay."

Similar allegations are made regarding Fallon's infamous interview with Paris Hilton: "Hilton and MoonPay purposefully did not disclose Hilton’s direct financial interest in MoonPay and, relatedly, the increased sale of Yuga securities through MoonPay," the suit states. "And again, there was no disclosure from any of the Tonight Show’s production companies, namely Defendants Universal or EHD, regarding Hilton’s and/or Fallon’s financial interests in MoonPay or compensation for promoting the BAYC NFTs."

The suit makes various allegations against the other defendants: For instance, it states that Gwyneth Paltrow announced that she had "joined" the Bored Apes Yacht Club in January 2022 and thanked MoonPay for its services, without disclosing that she was an investor in MoonPay and thus "had a vested interest in sales of Yuga securities." Bieber and Madonna were both allegedly given expensive NFTs in exchange for promoting Yuga and/or MoonPay. There are also purported links to the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, which failed spectacularly in November.

Yuga Labs denied the claims in a statement sent to The Hollywood Reporter. "In our view, these claims are opportunistic and parasitic," a spokesperson told the site. "We strongly believe that they are without merit, and look forward to proving as much."

A few years ago, in response to a CS:GO influencer gambling scandal, funny enough, the FTC published updated disclosure guidelines for influencers that laid things out in pretty simple terms, like "If a brand pays you or gives you free stuff, tell people about that relationship." In that light, this might seem like a fairly open-and-shut case, if lawyers can prove that some form of payment, direct or indirect, was made in exchange for the promotions. There's a long way to go before this lawsuit adds up to anything, though, and no guarantee that it will at all: At this point, the law firm spearheading the case is seeking approval to pursue the matter as a class action.

Rockstar has issued a clarification of its policies around Grand Theft Auto Online roleplay servers, a move that has caused some consternation among the huge community that play GTA Online this way, but seems sparked by an isolated server set up to promote a rapper. Yep: take a bow Lil Durk, if that is your real name.

GTA Online's new policy on roleplay servers was posted November 18 and is, as you would expect, rather lawyerly. It begins by saying Rockstar believes in "reasonable fan creativity" and that it hopes roleplay servers will continue to "thrive in a safe and friendly way" for years to come.

It says that the stuff it wants to target and remove from any association with GTA Online is:

• misuse of Rockstar Games trademarks or game intellectual property (IP)
• importation or misuse of other IP in the project, including other Rockstar IP, real-world brands, characters, trademarks or music
• commercial exploitation, including the sale of “loot boxes” for real-world currency or its in-game equivalent, the sale of virtual currencies, generating revenue via corporate sponsorships or in-game integrations, or the use of cryptocurrencies or crypto assets (e.g. “NFTs”)
• making new games, stories, missions, or maps
• interfering with our official multiplayer or online services, including Grand Theft Auto Online and Red Dead Online.

Most of those are pretty self-evident, but number three is almost certainly what's sparked this clarification. In October a press release announced that "Lil Durk fuses music and gaming together with latest GTA based NFT drop". It said the rapper would release a "Trenches Pass" giving fans access to a "pre-sale", which was an NFT offering exclusive access to a GTA Online roleplay server. Apparently there was also some sort of loot box element to this pass.

This is becoming something of a problem for any game where players can establish their own servers, with Minecraft in particular fighting against several attempts to associate the game with blockchain and NFTs. It's easy to see that people would be confused as to whether a GTA server incorporating NFTs was official or not, and Rockstar clearly doesn't want people selling stuff off the back of its baby.

A notice posted to social media has announced the Trenches server went down yesterday after Take Two's friendly lawyers got in touch. "It has been brought to our attention we've been notified [sic] from the legal counsel of Take Two Interactive Software Inc., the parent company of Rockstar Games Inc. We've been asked to cease all operations of Trenches [...] We have no choice but to comply with their demands."

So long Lil Durk, we hardly knew thee. The statement does say they'll try and work something out with Rockstar and Take Two, but good luck with that.

As for the wider GTA roleplay community, Rockstar's clarification of policy seems like nothing to worry about. The roleplay side of this game is arguably part of why it has such a long tail, remaining a huge draw on Twitch, and it would be counter-productive to go after something that's arguably been part of the series ever since they began hitting PC. This is about going after those who try to sell stuff off the back of GTA Online's success, essentially, or looking to imply an association that isn't there. Because this isn't chump change: GTA Online makes half a billion dollars a year, even if it's still a hot mess.

A couple of weeks ago, Square Enix filed a trademark in Japan for the term Symbiogenesis. With the word's definition being the basis for the 1995 classic Parasite Eve, it drummed up hype that a remake announcement was imminent. 

Oh, how silly of us to put so much faith into Square Enix in the year of our lord 2022, because sike! It's not a Parasite Eve remake at all. Instead, the publisher has unveiled a new "collectible art" NFT project. In a 30-second trailer backed by an utterly ear-splitting invasive song, Square Enix proudly proclaims "untangle the story" before revealing the logo for the project and its release date: Spring 2023.

Unsurprisingly, the announcement has gone down like a lead balloon. Square Enix is being appropriately ratio'd with some excellent meme replies that have been swiftly tucked away in my own personal folder, ready to use the next time Square decides to unveil some bullshit. Apart from the fact that most people have realised how awful NFTs are (both as a concept and environmentally), it does seem like a mighty slap in the face to excited Parasite Eve fans.

It's unknown if the so-called "art" project will have any relation to the series, though for the sake of Parasite Eve fans I sure hope not. On its dedicated Twitter page it's touted as a "new franchise," which makes its relation to the game unlikely. For now though just sit back, relax and enjoy the Twitter replies thoroughly rinsing the publisher for its terrible decisions. I've got the popcorn ready to go. 

Square Enix's fixation on NFTs has been a bizarre and frustrating journey. Despite the company's president being aware that "people who 'play to have fun' and who currently form the majority of players" hate NFTs, he's remained enthusiastic about the concept. He continued to tout the terrible narrative into 2022, with Square Enix joining a blockchain in September. It's disheartening to see a once-revered developer fall so far from grace, especially when it's gutting so many of its Western studios and series in pursuit of crappy things. 

It's been awhile since we last heard from Will Wright, the famed designer behind SimCity, The Sims, and (for the oldsters out there) Raid on Bungeling Bay. And it brings me no pleasure to say that he recently revealed what he's up to these days, and it's a blockchain game called Voxverse.

Voxverse is being developed by Gallium Studios, a developer co-founded by Wright and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? co-creator Lauren Elliott. Gallium is also working on an AI simulation game for mobile called Proxi, but that's been kicking around for several years now—we first heard about iy back in 2018. Voxverse, though, is something new.

"Almost everything in this world is actually going to be constructed by the players," Wright said in a video introducing the game. "We're going to have very simple tools for the players to construct buildings, objects, vehicles, etc. There'll be a whole economy, resources you can mine, plots that you can own, plus a social side of the game where you build a social network [with] the other Voxes that you meet."

"There will also be jobs," Wright notes later in the video. "We'll allow people to actually create business, employ other Voxes, or work in a job. One of the interesting things here is that even when you're offline your Vox is still going to be online as an NPC, so when I'm offline my Vox can still be working at a job and earning me money."

That doesn't sound like the most compelling videogame experience ever—if anything, it strikes me as a wholly generic description that could be applied to just about every other blockchain game I've ever heard of. Ownership and economics are clearly at the core of the experience, but Wright told Axios that he's "much more interested in attracting a million free-to-play players than, you know, 10,000 rich whales, although we could use those rich whales." (In free-to-play terminology, "whales" are players who spend significant amounts of money on a game.)

Voxverse is being developed in partnership with Gala Games, which sells "Vox" NFTs based on various licensed properties (it recently announced a deal to make Vox NFTs based on Dreamworks' Trolls) and operates several blockchain-based games, including Peter Molyneux's NFT project Legacy. Voxes will be incorporated as characters in Voxverse, and it will also be "a place for other games to live," with portals to other Gala games, all of which will be interoperable with your Vox NFTs. Despite all that, Wright said that he doesn't want to be "in the business of selling NFTs."

"I don't care how you do it," he said. "I want to have secure transactions for content creators."

Downplaying the role of NFTs in Voxverse while emphasizing the need for "secure transactions" are kind of inherently conflicting positions, and while Wright may be someone with some actually interesting ideas for a metaverse, a lot of what he's describing here sounds like The Sims with a real-world nine-to-five grind attached to it. Maybe Will Wright is the man who can make blockchain gaming work, but it's been a long time since I've looked at him as a "can't miss" game maker, and this announcement is not doing anything to change my mind on that front.

Fresh from resurrecting Suikoden 1 and 2 (and earning some amount of public goodwill in the process), Konami has seen fit to remind us that, yes, it's still the company that made over $150,000 off its Castlevania NFT sale back in January. A news release on the company's website states that Konami is on the hunt for people who can help it build the systems and services it needs to "provide new experiences such as WEB3 and Metaverse".

Konami has been hard at work "conducting research and development to incorporate the latest technology into games and contents," says the release, and plans to launch a service where "players can trade their in-game NFTs (digital items) through a unique distribution platform using blockchain".

In other words, Konami wants to build its own NFT trading platform. The company says that the NFTs players will be trading (or that it hopes they will be) "can be used in-game as items," to "interact with other services and communities," and to "participate in fan communities and events". 

The first pledge is clear enough: players will be able to trade in-game gear on Konami's platform, but the next two are a little fuzzy. I'm guessing the second is  another way of saying you'll be trading with other Konami fans, not just fans of whichever game you're into, and the third could refer to an NFT-based event ticketing system? We'll have to wait, breath bated, to find out.

It's not exactly an auspicious time to get on board the NFT train: last month it was reported that NFT transactions on OpenSea—the most popular online marketplace for non-fungible gewgaws—had fallen by 90% since the start of the year. This is in addition to a wider crypto crash that occurred in the middle of this year.

But crypto is a volatile market at the best of times, and it could be that Konami simply expects it to bounce back like it's done before. Or, perhaps, the company has just built up enough inertia around its "WEB3 and Metaverse" projects that there's just no stopping them at this point. Either way, who wants to bet which we'll see first: Metal Gear remasters, or Metal Gear NFTs?

CNN's foray into the world of NFTs has come to an untimely end with an announcement that Vault, which promised to let users "collect NFTs of historic CNN moments and artistic representations," is closing.

"The Vault team is honored to have partnered with amazing journalists, producers, artists, photojournalists, and collectors from all over the world during our time together, but we have decided that it's time to say goodbye to Vault by CNN," Vault said in a message posted on Twitter.

"Vault was originally launched as a six-week experiment, but the support and engagement from our community let us expand this project into something much larger. Thank you to each of you for your interest and engagement in what we built together."

Vault was launched in June 2021 as a repository for "digital collectibles"—NFTs—drawn from CNN's archives. The plan was to begin with six weekly drops including "key historical moments organized around specific themes including early CNN exclusives, world history, and Presidential Elections," followed by future drops featuring a wider range of topics.

"Tokenholders will be able to showcase and display their Moments on a user page in the Vault," the Vault website states. "Some limited edition sets will include a premium video display case that will render a physical representation of the Moment on a screen."

Naturally, there was also a promise of money to be made: CNN said Vault would "experiment with a variety of selling formats including both open editions and limited editions."

This is the sort of thing CNN was offering for sale:

CNN said in the announcement that while Vault will no longer be developed or maintained, "the Vault NFT collection will live on." Unsurprisingly, not all owners of CNN NFTs found that statement satisfying. Multiple responses on Twitter accused CNN of a "rug pull," a term used to describe scammers who promote an NFT but then take the money and run. 

It's a bit of a stretch to ascribe that to CNN, which clearly isn't relying on NFTs sales to cover the bills: It's on track to earn nearly $1 billion in profit in 2022—and take note, that is the network's worst performance since 2016 and apparently a cause for alarm, because the world in which we live is fundamentally broken. More to the point, everyone involved got what they paid for. Vault is going away but the NFTs will continue to exist, at least as much as NFTs can be said to exist at all.

But other complaints about CNN characterizing Vault as a six-week experiment that ran its course are harder to shrug off. In fact, the 2022 roadmap is still posted on the Vault documentation site, promising everything from a new Photography for Change series of NFTs to "exclusive CNN perks for Vault collectors" and the ability to mint NFTs based on any CNN article you want.

It's not going much better on the Vault Discord, where complaints of a rug pull and demands for refunds (and occasional threats of legal action) are common. Partial refunds apparently will be offered: Details will be announced later but Vault Discord admin Jason said in a message that they will be offered as either Flow or stablecoins valued at approximately 20% of the original mint price for each NFT owned. That hasn't gone over especially well either.

"20% is way low," one Discord user wrote. "75% or higher. I will reach out to my lawyer this week. Six week experiment was never conveyed to us."

"Literally a joke," another replied. "It's all goin' to zero once you guys shut down."

One user indirectly (and perhaps unintentionally) suggested that the relatively low refund offering is due to the fact that people aren't really losing anything. Vault NFTs will remain accessible and tradeable on Flow-compatible NFT marketplaces even after Vault itself is gone. That's good news for people who want to keep their digital collectibles (and some people in the Vault Discord said they'll continue to treasure them as such) but the worry for 'investors' is that the end of Vault will make it more difficult to turn a profit on Vault NFTs in the future. 

"As an investor I don't know if I can expect to break even in a few years," the Discord user wrote. "Is CNN able to share why they think 20% is fair b/c to me that implies they hopefully think we can break even or make profits within a few years right? if not then this seems like a rug pull. What optimism are they basing the rebate percentage on?"

I've reached out to Vault administrators for more information on the refund offering, and will update if I receive a reply.

The Epic Store saw the launch of its first NFT game today, Blankos Block Party, a sort of Roblox-like creation game powered by everyone's favorite tech snake oil, Web3 and the blockchain.

First, an acknowledgement⁠—we featured Blankos Block Party at The PC Gaming Show in 2020, a time when the idea of blockchain-based gaming was still in its unassuming infancy, as opposed to its current scammy, speculative, recovering-from-the-recent-crypto-crash adolescence. 

Our writeup at the time contains dark portents of what was to come. "With some Blankos being seasonal or limited edition, there's a certain rarity to certain characters. It follows the same logic of collecting physical designer toys in that sense," PC Gamer wrote that year. If only we had known.

There are definitely some appealing fundamentals to Blankos. After all, Roblox is a megahit with some neat ideas: What if someone made something like it that didn't look, you know, like that. The "Social Multiplayer Party Game" has a robust-looking level editor, one that reminds me of Fortnite Creative or Little Big Planet and could, under the right circumstances, foster a similar environment of user creativity.

Blankos has the look of a pleasant and charming multiplayer playground, but I find it hard to see it as anything other than another example of a highly negative gaming trend, one the formerly quite bullish Ubisoft recently distanced itself from. A quick search of the game's name on YouTube fails to yield examples of cool community projects, but rather a litany of guides on how to earn money while playing it.

Steam took a hardline stance against blockchain games, while the Epic Store has left the door open to NFTs. Time will tell if Epic will reap the rewards with some Web3 megahits. According to WorthPlaying, Blankos developer Mythical Games claimed it reached one million player accounts in December 2021, but its footprint on YouTube and Twitch seems fairly light, with just 41 concurrent viewers on the latter platform at the time of writing.

But maybe my skepticism is unfounded, especially when Blankos has such killer apps as the Minny B winged donkey-looking skin made in collaboration with Burberry. It's only $900 too, an absolute bargain. 

Square Enix has been one of the most bullish of the major publishers in announcing its intention to seriously invest in blockchain technology. At the start of the year, president Yosuka Matsuda said the company intends to "ramp up our efforts to develop a business accordingly, with an eye to potentially issuing our own tokens in the future."

What exactly that might mean remains to be seen, though one unexpected outcome was Square Enix selling off its Western studios and series like Deus Ex and Tomb Raider to Embracer group for roughly $300 million. A good chunk of this money was earmarked for Square Enix's crypto projects and, when discussing last year's financial results, it kept on banging the drum for blockchain, NFTs and other things that fung in the night.

Now, Square Enix is going to become part of a blockchain. It will be one of 21 'node validators' of the Oasys blockchain, which like all of them claims to be eco-friendly and not like all those other blockchains. A node validator is an entity that maintains a copy of a given blockchain, and has a role in verifying and keeping records of all its transactions. No word yet on what the Gallagher brothers think about the name.

The Oasys project does have some serious Japanese talent behind it, including Hajime Nakatani (president and CEO of Bandai Namco's research division), and Shuji Utsumi (a founding member at Playstation, co-founder of Q Entertainment, and current co-COO of Sega), and it has secured commitments from several big publishers, including unsurprisingly Bandai Namco and Sega as well as those crypto-fanciers over at Ubisoft.

Yosuke Saito, the director of Square Enix's Blockchain Entertainment Division, said:

"Our shared enthusiasm for Web3 gaming makes this an exciting partnership for us and we look forward to gaining insights that can advance the creation of all-new gameplay experiences for gamers across the globe."

Most concerning for the gamer in the street will be this line from the press release: "As part of this initiative, Square Enix and Oasys will explore the feasibility of harnessing user contributions in the development of new games on the Oasys blockchain."

Well, we had a good run everyone. Oasys doesn't yet have a firm launch date but it's expected to happen later this year. Then I suppose we'll get our first glimpse of what happens when Final Fantasy fans get offered the chance to buy 'one-of-a-kind' moogles.

Efforts to integrate NFTs into videogames have been largely unsuccessful for a few reasons, but essentially it can be boiled down to two primary points: 

 1. They don't add anything of value, and 

2. There's a nonzero chance that the digital stuff you own will be stolen from you, aka a 'rugpull.'

And that's without even considering the environmental damage caused by NFTs. But as seen in a new Rest of World report, that's not preventing NFT evangelists from coming up with even worse ideas for the future.

The bulk of the story by the nonprofit journalism organization is about a Minecraft-based NFT game called Critterz, which enjoyed enough success in its early days that some players began hiring others to help build their in-game ownings in exchange for a cut of the profits. One such high roller, who goes by the name Big Chief, had "his team"—made up mainly of kids in the Philippines—collect building materials for a casino, which he then paid "professional Minecraft builders" $10,000 to actually create.

"I have a lot of kids that play for me, and they play because they want to make extra money in a country that’s really just locking them down," Big Chief explained. People in the Philippines were willing to play the game this way, he added, because "they were able to earn just enough where it was worth their while."

It wasn't just play, though. Big Chief said members of his play-to-earn guild were required to put in eight hours a day, the equivalent of a full-time job, in order to recover the costs of NFT purchases—the digital "plots of land"—and maximize revenues as quickly as possible. Still, he said was "annoyed" by the suggestion that his exploitation of disadvantaged people in poor countries was, you know, exploitation.

"I couldn’t tell you what the hourly rate comes to, but I could tell you that people make very little money and the cost of living is very low in the Philippines," Big Chief said.

But as Critterz grew in popularity, its value began to drop: Big Chief said players were selling their $BLOCK tokens used in the game rather than holding them "because they need money to live," which combined with the increased number of players created a token glut that drove prices down. Following the trajectory of most cryptocurrency in 2022,  $BLOCK sunk from a high of 85 cents in January to just 3 cents in May. The wheels didn't really come off, though, until July, when Mojang declared that NFT integration into Minecraft is "not something we will support or allow." That cut the value of $BLOCK, already dramatically diminished, in half. Earnings dropped, player counts fell off, and at this point the future of Critterz is uncertain at best.

Big Chief understandably bemoaned his loss—that is, the loss of his ability to do so much good for others.

"I treated a lot of these kids like they’re my kids, so it’s kind of sad now that I can’t really offer them much," Big Chief said. "Before, I was really helping a lot of these kids, giving them an opportunity to make some extra cash for their families and it just kind of sucks that I can’t really do that right now."

Luckily, for him at least, people are coming up with fresh ideas for how citizens of the Third World can be put to productive use by wealthy Westerners. Mikhai Kossar of blockchain gaming consultant Wolves DAO, for instance, suggested that they could be added to the background of videogames for the amusement of other, presumably wealthier players.

"With the cheap labor of a developing country, you could use people in the Philippines as NPCs, real-life NPCs in your game," Kossar said, apparently seriously. They would "just populate the world, maybe do a random job or just walk back and forth, fishing, telling stories, a shopkeeper, anything is really possible."

It's an odious idea, perfectly in-character for the NFT field, and literally the dictionary definition of exploitation: "Selfish utilization … especially for profit." As much as I hate to admit it, it's also not at all outside the realm of possibility. Paying people to do the heavy lifting in your videogame of choice is nothing new—most of us are at least passingly familiar with the practice of gold farming in MMOs—but the introduction of real money into these systems only encourages bad behavior. It's dystopian, but also foundational: As long as real money is involved, there will always be people willing to pursue it, and there will always be others eager to take advantage of them.

Adata's subsidiary brand XPG has just come out with an anime series called Xtreme Saga starring its ambassador Mera, a red-headed fireball with a heart of gold. And while her kawaii semblance truly melts my heart, there appears to be an ulterior motive here. There's something web3 shaped lurking under that adorable facade.

XPG's area of expertise lies in PC components. It makes RAM, fans and PSUs, as well as peripherals and pre-built systems. Why the company has decided to branch out into "transmedia" storytelling is utterly beyond me, but I figured I'd give it a go. How bad could it be?

XPG knows its tech, right? So a sci-fi anime from the same company must have some truly simulacrum-disrupting ideologies. Surely there'll be some technologically-fuelled philosophical gems meant to propel us into the next era of animated entertainment.

Oh.

From what I can tell, Xtreme Saga is an anime centred around the themes of hope, justice, leadership and empathy, but its execution is so far off the mark I'm seriously on the verge of turning in my weeb badge. It's like some AI generated approximation of what an anime should look like, and I'm not convinced it's even finished.

Despite my colleagues' concern for my sanity, I somehow managed to get through the first 10 minutes of Xtreme Saga, and I'm already convinced watching the widely detested EX-ARM anime would be a preferable way to spend my afternoon.

Let's just say it's no God Eater, and leave it at that—but that's just my take on the art style.

The pseudo-philosophy being spouted here hurts me to my core, but this isn't an anime for intellectuals like you and I. It's a gateway for the impressionable into something much less stable than a simple anime obsession.

What strikes me most about it, is that such a superficial anime concept doesn't seem to align with "the core XPG mission statement of ensuring better experiences." And a quick look at the site reveals that it's not about breaking into the world of CGI anime to express some poignant philosophy at all. It never was.

It's about selling NFTs, of course. 

"There are several different types of Xtreme Saga merchandise," the press release notes. "Xtreme Saga NFTs, plans for a serialised version of the story in text, and in the future XPG even hopes to produce a feature length animated film."

Please God, no.

"XPG has stated that Xtreme Saga is meant to last for years to come and hopefully will grow in popularity to the point of being able to produce more content faster in the near future."

The company talks about the "Xtreme Universe," with XPG admitting it's "in the process of finding the layout of the Metaverse." The site even calls for you to "Activate your gamer instinct, become a [Xtreme Saga Fan Club] NFT collector, and enter a new realm with us, Game to The Xtreme!"

Welp, it would seem that heart of Mera's isn't necessarily made of gold at all. But it is minted.

Untamed Isles, a "monster-taming turn-based MMORPG" that found major success on Kickstarter, has been put "on hiatus" because of the crypto crash—Kickstarter backers are being told that there's no money left for refunds.

The 2021 Kickstarter campaign for Untamed Isles rang up a remarkable $527,000 in backing—more than four times its initial goal. It promised a fully open world with "unique areas for friends to gather, practice PVP, trade, breed monsters, clear dungeons, and play through the story of untamed isles socially with open voice proximity communications." 

It also boasted a "play to earn" model in partnership with Direwolf, which would enable most of the items and all of the monsters in the game to be "tokenized" and bought, sold, or traded in various marketplaces or the in-game auction house. Unfortunately, the commitment to crypto is where it all went wrong.

"To work on this project we brought more than 70 staff members on board and we were working relentlessly for more than 2 years to build the game we all were dreaming about," developer Phat Loot Studios wrote on Steam. "The truth is that the cost of development is high and there were lots of bumps on our way to this moment. Since we started the journey in 2020, the economic landscape has changed dramatically both generally and specifically for cryptocurrency, and we are not confident in the current market. We ran out of financial resources and we can’t carry on the development at this moment."

Phat Loot said it "leaned into the crypto market and expanded rapidly off the back of the positive interest," which left it in an untenable position when the crash came. Untamed Isles is not primarily a crypto-based game, it added, but funding from crypto investors is necessary to get the game finished and launched. 

"Unlike many of the projects that have floundered in the storm, we actually have a great game design that could stand on its own two feet," the studio said. "But until the crypto situation is resolved—and we're confident it will be at some stage—then we have to hibernate development on this project."

The "crypto situation" is an understated description of the market collapse that has sunk cryptocurrencies to their lowest values in years. External factors ranging from general global economic malaise to the Russian invasion of Ukraine have had an impact, but the bigger issue is the inherently risky and unstable nature of cryptocurrency. Millions of dollars have been lost in hacks that, as we said following the $200 million Nomad heist in July, are starting to feel like weekly events. Even when criminality isn't involved, the basic ethics of crypto are iffy at best: Last week, for instance, Riot Blockchain (unrelated to League of Legends studio Riot Games, for the record) was able to mine $7 million in Bitcoin effectively for free by taking advantage of state subsidies in Texas, despite the fact that Texas is in the midst of an ongoing energy crisis.

There's also a growing backlash against cryptocurrencies and NFTs among wider audiences: Free-to-play autobattler Storybook Brawl was review-bombed in March after the developer was bought by a cryptocurrency exchange, and in May Wikipedia announced that it will no longer accept cryptocurrency donations.

Phat Loot explained in a livestream last week that things started to go sideways when MMOByte posted a video in July apologizing for supporting Untamed Isles and disavowing crypto games in general: Host Stix said in the video that he is "very strongly against those specific types of games."

Another blow was suffered when 2016 Pokemon World Champion Wolfe Glick, who had been hired to help design the Untamed Isles combat system, appeared to speak out against the NFT aspect on Twitter.

Phat Loot said those events triggered a cascade effect that caused other mainstream media companies to cancel planned coverage; influencers who had been lined up to push the game also started to pull out. Pre-sales fell well short of anticipated levels—just 50 presales were made, rather than the hoped-for 2,000-3,000. 

The more significant long-term issue, though, was the impact of the crypto crash.

"We had some fantastic investors lined up to inject several more million dollars into the project through a variety of equity raising and selling of the Phat Loot Token which we were working on in the background," the studio said during the stream. "It was all going really really well. Then the crypto crash occurred and we lost that funding very very quickly. The investors pulled out as they watched the market crashing—and to be fair, they're right to do so because these are very uncertain times in the global economy."

Phat Loot had decided to launch Untamed Isles in a more bare-bones state in October, ahead of its original schedule, in order to get it out (and start generating revenue) as soon as possible. But the studio was burning through "close to NZ$100,000 ($62,700) per week" in wages and costs, and developers realized that they were "likely not going to be able to make the revenue from our launch to keep the lights on." 

Unfortunately, while investors were able to dodge the bullet and people who pre-purchased the game and Phat Loot Tokens will be given refunds, individual backers on Kickstarter and Backerkit are out of luck. The Kickstarter campaign promised that full refunds would be issued to all backers if Untamed Isles failed to launch—and numerous backers have asked for one—but an FAQ at untamedisles.com says that refunds will not be available because, well, there's no money. 

That's gone over about as well as you might expect (which is to say, not well at all) and there's also quite a few backers upset that the project was based on cryptocurrency in the first place.

"Why on earth would you invest in cryptocurrency?" one backer wrote. "It's fake money! It's all a scam! If I knew that was where you were leaning, I never would have joined. If refunds are happening, I want mine please. Ye gods, when will people realize crypto is a huge scam?"

"Refund ta. Didn't back this for my money to be involved with crypto," another wrote.

That confusion about Untamed Isle's reliance on cryptocurrency apparently arose from the fact that no mention is made of it until more than halfway through the Kickstarter campaign description—it's there, but minimized. Kickstarter backers aren't the only ones who complained about that lack of transparency. Stix of MMOByte made the same complaint in his video, saying that he wasn't aware of the crypto integration because "it isn't until you scroll about 60% down the page that they even mention 'play to earn.'"

The presence of the game on Steam may also contribute to the confusion, because Valve banned all games incorporating NFTs or cryptocurrency from Steam last year. Its presence could be explained by the fact that the Steam listing makes absolutely no mention of the cryptocurrency integration: Hiding that aspect of the game doesn't seem great for its long-term future on the storefront, but gamers coming to the project through Steam would be given no indication of the presence of cryptocurrency integration.

In a statement released today, Phat Loot said that it did not invest money raised through crowdfunding and "traditional investment" into cryptocurrencies, but that it was forced to stop development because of the withdrawal of investors spooked by the crypto crash and "the negative sentiment associated with web3-integrated games." But to my thinking, that opens the door to questions about the timing of the announcement: We wrote about the cryptocurrency market "experiencing an unprecedented crash" back in May, yet Phat Loot launched the preorder campaign on August 1, just ten days before putting it all on hold, providing no indication that the game was in trouble.

Phat Loot founders said they are now "looking at ways to salvage both the core studio and the game so that it can be completed and released down the track along with other possible titles." There's no sign of when that might happen, however: The studio said in its most recent livestream that conventional publishers are put off by the crypto, while crypto investors aren't doing anything because of the crumbled state of the market. 

Interestingly, Phat Loot said that it likely could have raised enough money to get Untamed Isles to launch—the problem is what happens after that. "We can't get the traction or following through marketing and there's no revenue in crypto right now," the team said. "How much money can you raise until you launch the game and it ends up burning a hole in our team, and we lose it?"

I've reached out to Phat Loot for more information on the state of Untamed Isles, and will update if I receive a reply.

Sclerotic Funko Pop retailer GameStop continues its ill-advised NFT marketplace pivot despite a string of embarrassments. Less than two weeks after news broke that its service played host to an NFT "adaptation" of a famous image of a 9/11 victim falling to their death, an Ars Technica report has revealed that the GameStop NFT marketplace facilitated the sale of unauthorized NFT copies of indie games. 

An individual named Nathan Ello released the NiFTy Arcade collection on GameStop's marketplace, earning 8.4 ETH (about $14,000) in initial sales. Ello definitively did not have permission to use at least two of these games in his project, and it also appears, but is not entirely certain, that he was not authorized to use a further three more games included in the NiFTy Arcade. Ello additionally did not have license to use the PICO-8 engine utilized in all five of those games.

Ultimately, the NiFTy Arcade was pulled from the GameStop marketplace and Ello's account was suspended, but the diffuse nature of NFTs means that users can still access their copies of these unlicensed games, and their creators may not have any recourse. Ello offered to compensate the developers harmed by the NiFTy Arcade, and has meanwhile revived the project on another marketplace with a promise that future games will be "in proper compliance with all terms of service of the NFT marketplace."

This story is yet another example of the shady behavior facilitated by NFT marketplaces. The summer 2021 promises NFTs ensuring artists' "ownership" of their work have swiftly given way to a reality where their work is often exploited against their will. This is all while the NFTs themselves continue to offer no tangible benefits or use cases beyond profit generation, as Brazilian developer Mark Venturelli so eloquently put in his talk at the Brazil International Games Festival last month. This isn't even the first instance of NFT creators turning extant games into blockchain tokens, with MetaGravity's Retro Arcade Collection offering this treatment to a selection of older, bigger-budget games.

It's especially odious to see this spiritually deadening NFT nonsense from GameStop fester when you remember that the company recently laid off a significant number of employees, including some of our peers at the long-running videogame magazine Game Informer. 

Update: Solana posted a statement via a Twitter thread regarding the status of its investigation:

"After an investigation by developers, ecosystem teams, and security auditors, it appears affected addresses were at one point created, imported, or used in Slope mobile wallet applications. This exploit was isolated to one wallet on Solana, and hardware wallets used by Slope remain secure. While the details of exactly how this occurred are still under investigation, but private key information was inadvertently transmitted to an application monitoring service. There is no evidence the Solana protocol or its cryptography was compromised."

Original story: Thousands of digital wallets on the Solana blockchain were drained of funds by a "malicious actor" last night. Over $5.2 million in crypto assets were lost in the attack, but Solana is blaming external software, stating that it's not an issue with its own blockchain.

Cybersecurity experts have surmised that it may be a vulnerability in the wallet software, not the Solana blockchain itself, which will at least be a relief for some. The last update from Solana from this morning says: "This does not appear to be a bug with Solana core code, but in software used by several software wallets popular among users of the network."

The attack drained over 8,000 wallets though that number could rise if more and more users report compromised wallets. The affected wallets include but are not limited to Solflare, Trust Wallet, Phantom, and Slope.

Trust Wallet CEO, Eowyn Chen, said, "Trust Wallet doesn't log the private keys or secret phrase anywhere. It takes 20 hours to zoom in again to ensure our security. Here's the closure to the past 20 hours. Upward and onward!" Chen also recommends that users not "use the same wallet on different wallet apps to reduce exposure like this."

Phantom took to Twitter to say that it, too, is working with Solana though it says at "this time, the team does not believe this is a Phantom-specific issue."

Solflare has posted some security updates and said, "we are following the situation closely, and we feel the pain in the community," and accompanied it with a sad face emoji. 

The root cause of the exploit is still being looked into, but OtterSec, a blockchain auditor, said on Twitter that the transactions were "signed by the actual owners, suggesting some sort of private key compromise." They also claim that some users on the Ethereum blockchain might be affected, though not as prevalent as Solana.

Elliptic, a blockchain analysis firm, says the assets stolen were "SOL, a small number of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and over 300 Solana-based tokens."

Solana also strongly encourages people to use hardware wallets (or cold wallets), since there is no evidence that the exploit has affected them, and to move their funds to a centralized platform. If you had your wallet drained, consider it compromised and do not continue using it. It's also good practice to keep your funds in a cold wallet and only use wallet software (or hot wallets) in small amounts for making transactions.

Solana is asking victims to complete a survey to help its engineers investigate exactly what happened.

While the gaming mainstream remains deeply distrustful of anything associated with crypto, one of the apparent successes was Axie Infinity: a Pokémon-style game built around pets called Axies that can be traded, battled and, of course, are claimed to have some sort of 'real' value. Axie Infinity's ecosystem was valued in the hundreds of millions. Then, on March 23, the company's 'sidechain' Ronin network was hacked, with the perpetrators stealing Ethereum and USDC stablecoins that were at the time valued in the region of $600 million.

The game's developer Sky Mavis was forced to acknowledge the hack and disable token withdrawal. But not before Trung Nguyen, the CEO and co-founder, transferred $3 million worth of AXS, Axie's main currency, from the game's blockchain into Binance, a crypto exchange.

I appreciate that this is becoming a word salad of crypto terminology. The important point is that, when the outside world was unaware of the hack, or that trading in the game would be suspended as a result, a key inside player transferred a lot of value out of the Axie ecosystem. Oh: and no-one should have realised.

The transactions were first noticed and analysed by Asobs, a youtuber who analyses the crypto scene. They were tipped off about a wallet that had moved 48,838 AXS tokens from Ronin (the sidechain network) to Binance, a huge amount, and managed to dig back through this wallet's transactions to see it had received the largest initial payment of AXS tokens when the game was launching.

Asobs then tracked down further wallets allegedly belonging to Sky Mavis employees through this method, a great tactic because the studio transfers AXS to employees regularly. Several of these had also made large transactions at the same time as the wallet which Asobs would eventually link to Nguyen. 

Bloomberg Business then picked up the baton, which soon ended up with Sky Mavis admitting to the transaction and that Nguyen owned the wallet concerned.

Kalie Moore, a Sky Mavis spokeswoman, claimed to Bloomberg Nguyen was in fact trying to help the Axie Infinity economy and ensure there was enough liquidity on-hand. She wrote:

"At the time, [Sky Mavis] understood that our position and options would be better the more AXS we had on Binance. This would give us the flexibility to pursue different options for securing the loans/capital required. The Founding Team chose to transfer it from this wallet to ensure that short-sellers, who track official Axie wallets, would not be able to front-run the news."

Moore adds that suggestions of any other motive are "baseless". Subsequent to this coverage, Nguyen himself took to social media:

"This story includes speculation of insider trading," writes Trung. "These accusations are baseless and false. In fact, the Founding Team even deposited $7.5M from a known Axie multi-sig wallet TO Ronin Network prior to the bridge closing to avoid triggering any short-sellers watching. My life’s work is Axie Infinity and the community we’ve created together. I take ownership of the security breach, and will use it as a learning experience."

Trung also goes on to claim that "the Bridge has been re-opened with all player funds backed 1:1. Many in the media have conveniently ignored this, as it doesn’t fit their predetermined narratives."

It is true that, following the hack, Sky Mavis immediately raised just over $150 million in funding, some of which was earmarked to reimburse victims of the attack, and the trading suspension was only temporary. But the 1:1 claim neglects to mention that the value of an AS token was $64 before the hack and is now trading at more like $18.

"We can see the money moved," Asobs says. “The only question is what happened behind the money moving.”

Whatever has gone on here, it's murky in a manner that is typical of crypto: a space where tangible value is always several steps removed and, in the cases of ecosystems like that of Axie Infinity, ultimately controlled by its keepers.

Of one thing there is no doubt, and that is the hack was very real. The US Treasury department pinned the heist on the North Korea-based hacker collective that calls itself Lazarus Group, and added them to its international sanctions list, saying in a statement sent to PC Gamer that this was due to the FBI identifying a digital wallet associated with the heist.  

"Through our investigation we were able to confirm Lazarus Group and APT38, cyber actors associated with the DPRK, are responsible for the theft of $620 million in Ethereum reported on March 29th," an FBI representative told PC Gamer. "The FBI, in coordination with Treasury and other U.S. Government partners, will continue to expose and combat the DPRK’s use of illicit activities—including cybercrime and cryptocurrency theft—to generate revenue for the regime."

Lazarus Group has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crypto over recent years, and some crypto security experts estimate that as a result the rogue nuclear state may now be sitting on over half a billion of unlaundered crypto assets. The US says this is all about avoiding sanctions and funding its weapon programs, and takes the threat very seriously: recently jailing a former employee of the Ethereum Foundation for more than five years (and fining him $100,000) for giving a presentation in North Korea in 2019 on "using cryptocurrency technologies to evade sanctions and launder money." Probably wasn't the wisest title for a talk.

As for Axie Infinity, it chugs along, though recent reports suggest its in-game economy is having its own collapse as digital 'landlords' struggle to find players willing to do the dirty work for them. Play to earn has never seemed an especially attractive prospect, and when you look at the kind of stories that coalesce around these projects, no wonder.

In February, videogame retailer/persistent meme GameStop announced it was planning to open an NFT marketplace. Currently in beta, the GameStop NFT marketplace allows customers to buy and sell NFTs minted by an approved selection of creators. One of those creators named Jules minted and began selling an NFT called Falling Man, in which a figure resembling an iconic Associated Press photograph of a man falling from the World Trade Center on 9/11 called The Falling Man is dressed like an astronaut and described with a caption, "This one probably fell from the MIR station."

GameStop's NFT marketplace currently uses astronauts as mascots, in places like the form new creators have to fill out and some downloadable wallpapers. That doesn't really explain why Jules thought it was appropriate to take such a well-known and already controversial image, turn it into a tasteless joke, and then try to profit from it. At any rate, after the NFT began being criticized on places like Web3 is going just great and the Resetera forum, GameStop delisted the image. Following the link now goes to a blank page, though the original is still preserved on the Wayback Machine.

Several people had already bought the NFT, of which 25 editions were minted. The GameStopNFT Twitter account explained the decision to one such customer, saying that, "Certain collections violated our terms of service, which resulted in the NFTs being suspended from our marketplace. You will still be able to transfer these NFTs to layer 1 and between wallets, but they cannot be sold on our marketplace."

Someone who complained about the image via a direct message was apparently told that, "This NFT will be removed from our marketplace entirely. This user has already had their minting ability removed from their account, and we have already been in direct contact with the creator about these actions."

On the meme stock subreddit GME_Meltdown, a user has suggested that the figure in the NFT is actually a render of an existing 3D model of a Russian flight suit created by a different artist and used without credit or permission. Here it is on Blender Market.

Mojang made waves yesterday when it said, in no uncertain terms, that NFTs are not welcome in Minecraft. Good news for gamers, perhaps, but not so much for anyone who has already committed to incorporating blockchain technology in the game—like, for instance, NFT Worlds.

"NFT Worlds is a fully decentralized, fully customizable, community driven, play to earn gaming platform where world owners can create their own limitless metaverse games or experiences for players or exclusive communities within their worlds," its website says. 

"Currently using Minecraft and it's sprawling open-source ecosystem, NFT Worlds builds on the backbone of a decades worth of open source development within the Minecraft community and radically expands on it to enable an entirely new types of 3D voxel-based, decentralized gaming metaverses backed by the Ethereum blockchain."

What that means, basically, is that it supports custom Minecraft servers where players can purchase plots of virtual land and earn (and spend) cryptocurrency—the kind of hybrid system that Mojang's blockchain policy seems specifically aimed at shutting down. And it definitely had an impact: The price of $WRLD tanked badly immediately following the studio's announcement.

In response to Mojang's new policy, NFT Worlds has issued a statement decrying Mojang and Minecraft as having "no regard for creators, builders, and players," and vowing to make its own game to replace it.

"We’re creating a new game and platform based on many of the core mechanics of Minecraft, but with the modernization and active development Minecraft has been missing for years," NFT Worlds said. "This is not a rewrite of some open source Minecraft clone, which likely would violate the EULA or still risk legal action, this is entirely from the ground up. This transition will additionally come with a public facing brand identity change that is more player friendly."

The new game will have a "playstyle, look, and feel" similar to Minecraft, NFT Worlds said, but will feature performance optimizations, graphical improvements, and new mechanics that will deliver "a more accessible, ownable, and enjoyable playing experience." It will be free for all players, and "completely untethered from the policy enforcement Microsoft and Mojang have over Minecraft." At the same time, it will also be backwards compatible with existing Minecraft server plugins, so when the time comes to switch platforms, content creators will be able to make the move with minimal fuss and muss.

Making a better Minecraft than Minecraft (while maintaining compatibility with Minecraft) is an awfully big job, and one that I think would invite some immediate and intense scrutiny from Microsoft, but NFT Worlds doesn't have many options. Mojang has effectively closed the door on its business model, but a wholesale switch to a new game would leave existing users, and everything they've built so far, out in the cold. The only way to keep the wheels turning is to come up with something that is functionally Minecraft without actually being Minecraft. That's a tall order.

In the more immediate future, NFT Worlds said it will make changes to its launcher and play pages to attract new players who aren't interested in the cryptocurrency angle. It also laid out some very dramatic, high stakes for the future of NFT Worlds as a battle for both the philosophical and technological soul of the internet.

"Microsoft has made it clear they will always act in the interest of their shareholders and balance sheet, to the detriment of innovation, player experience and creators," NFT Worlds said. "We believe an open, free, evolved version of what Minecraft brought to the world will be a better future for creators, developers and ultimately gamers.

"We’re fighting for a future with a player owned and operated economy, where all participants benefit from their contributions to the ecosystem. We recognize this is a monumental task."

I've reached out to Microsoft for comment on the NFT Worlds plan and will update if I receive a reply.

Yesterday Mojang drew a line in the sand, saying that NFT integration is "generally not something we will support or allow." This was prompted by a slew of unofficial Minecraft-adjacent NFTs alongside the appearance of play-to-earn servers for the game, which Mojang puts down to bad actors exploiting the gaps in official policy.

Given that NFTs generally seem a bit skeezy and that Minecraft's audience remains overwhelmingly young, this has to go down as A Good Thing.

A Twitter user commented on the Minecraft decision, tagging in Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and saying: "hey Epic Games, it’d be really nice to see the same opinion from the Epic Games Store. Please get rid of every last one of those games on the store "

Sweeney is an interesting guy because, alongside his obvious technical brilliance and understanding, he's deeply invested in fighting for certain principles of openness and what the role of platform holders should be (particularly when it comes to revenue splits). You don't have to like Sweeney, and he certainly says some ripe stuff on occasion, but the guy and his company are committed to what they believe and will go to bat for it, as the ongoing legal battle with Apple shows.

Sweeney responded to the call to ban NFTs on the Epic Game Store by re-stating some of the principles he believes should underlie such a store. He has been consistent about where he stands, and it's not the first time he's addressed the topic.

"Developers should be free to decide how to build their games, and you are free to decide whether to play them," Sweeney wrote in response. "I believe stores and operating system makers shouldn’t interfere by forcing their views onto others. We definitely won’t."

Somewhat predictably, this went down like a cup of cold sick. Sweeney's comment was met by a barrage of counter-points alongside more general complaints about the nature of NFTs themselves, such as their environmental impact. He responded to one asking why this stance was different to, for example, banning discriminatory or hateful content.

"These are all editorial and brand judgments," responded Sweeney. "A store could choose to make no such judgments and host anything that's legal, or choose to draw the line at mainstream acceptable norms as we do, or accept only games that conform to the owner's personal beliefs."

The main competitor to the Epic Games Store is of course Steam, which has already banned NFTs. The technology and 'web3' in general remain unpopular with the general online audience, even if there are plenty of ape-loving acolytes, and giving them a bit of a kicking is always going to be a crowd-pleaser (just look at the response to Mojang's announcement).

Sweeney does have a point though, inasmuch as he doesn't see it as Epic's role to go around telling developers not to use blockchain tech, and nor does he believe Epic should use its position to restrict their sale. The counter is that many of these projects are at the moment scammy, and that Mojang was arguably forced into action: to pick one example, the unofficial Minecraft NFT game Blockverse disappeared with more than $1.2 million in January. And there's no shortage of wider examples of NFT-related malfeasance or even outright criminality.

The fact remains that just because this is where the tech is now does not mean that this is how it will be forever. Whether Epic's stance will remain consistent in the face of the general audience disdain for the tech remains to be seen.

Neopets, a popular virtual pet-keeping browser game born of the late '90s, has been victim of a data breach. Hackers claiming to be behind the attack say they have personal account info of more than 69 million members, along with a bunch of the site's source code, and are willing to sell the data off for a fee.

The browser game has been wracked with cheaters for some time, but this just takes the biscuit. Since the site has begun associating itself with NFTs, it appears to have drawn some unwanted attention. Now, it may have gotten worse, as the company investigates a data breach where customer data may have been taken off its servers. It says usernames and passwords connected to the platform may be affected,  but email addresses, Neopets users' ages, genders, countries, birth dates, and even IP addresses are allegedly being auctioned off.

The official Neopets Twitter page has posted a warning to users, with the thread strongly recommending users change their Neopets password, and any accounts that use the same password (we advise you to never use the same password for multiple sites, anyway). 

It also notes that the breach is being looked into by a "leading forensics firm," though no name has been given as to which one.

The data appears to have been put up for sale on popular hacking forum, Breached.co (via Bleeping Computer), where one hacker known as TarTarX claims to have live access to the hacked database. For access to a snapshot of the database, the hacker is asking for four bitcoin (approximately $94,500). They note that they are "open to hear offers," and will accept other cryptocurrencies for the data. For an additional fee, they're offering live access to the database.

The validity of TarTarX's claims has apparently been confirmed by the hacking site's owner, pompompurin, who tried creating an account and was promptly sent their data back. What this means is the hacker may well have continued access to the data, so anyone with enough cryptocurrency to blow can allegedly watch people scramble to change their passwords and simply nab them after the fact.

If you head to Neopets' account security page, it confusingly says that "contrary to what many people claim, no one has ever "hacked into our site" and accessed user information, accounts or usernames. The ONLY means by which a user can have his/her [their, actually] account stolen by someone else is when that user inadvertently or intentionally gives out their account password."

"People like to say they have been hacked, as it makes them feel a little better than admitting they have fallen for a scam, or just simply given away their password to the first person that asked them for it. However, there are a number of things you can do to help keep your account secure."

That statement might be a little out of date now.

After hearing the news, I tried to delete my account through this link, but my initial attempt was met with the message above. I suspect it's something to do with the volume of people likely deleting their accounts right now.

A second attempt then finally allowed me to delete my account, and I'm sorry to be leaving but, and I suspect plenty of people (particularly parents of younger users) will be following suit.

One of the biggest collectors of Bored Apes has embarrassed himself by accidentally spending over $150,000 on his own joke domain name.

Franklinisbored, whose Ape collection currently numbers at 57 hideous monkeys, has a hobby of making up weird Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domains—basically usernames that Ethereum traders can use instead of having to remember 64-character addresses—and placing absurdly large bids on them. Doing so compels blockchain-monitoring Twitter bots to tweet out both the domain name and bid amount to their followers for Franklin's amusement.

That's exactly what happened this time, too. Franklin generated a silly new ENS domain and put a bid of 100 ETH ($150k) on it. What was different was this one attracted a genuine bid of 1.9 ETH (nearly $2,900) too, which he quickly accepted. Tragicomedy struck when, just as Franklin was tweeting about his sudden windfall, the new owner accepted Franklin's own joke bid for the domain, which he had forgotten to cancel in the afterglow of the unexpected sale. This all happened within 15 minutes.

The name of the domain was stop-doing-fake-bids-its-honestly-lame-my-guy.eth.

Franklin sent the buyer their original 1.9 ETH alongside an explanatory NFT asking for a show of compassion and a refund of his 100 ETH (minus fees). He received neither. What he got instead was an NFT from the 'Franklin ENS Nutz' collection that read, "No, thank you for the money though".

In fairness Franklin has been pretty relaxed about the whole thing, tweeting, "This will be the joke and bag fumble of the century," and admitting that he deserves "all the jokes and criticism". Of course, anyone who owns 57 of the hottest JPEGs in town probably has enough money to weather a $150k blow anyway.

NFTs have had an even rougher ride than usual recently, and they've never been popular in our neck of the woods. Whether it's Seth Green's kidnapped ape (since returned, thank heavens), Microsoft's statement that NFTs are at odds with Minecraft's values, or just one of the many stories of scams, stitch-ups, and expensive mistakes that seem to pour out of the crypto sphere, the entire technology feels more and more like dark comedy all the time. But hey, maybe those Square Enix NFTs will turn the whole thing around. I wouldn't hold my breath, though.

Thanks, Web3IsGoingGreat.

Mojang has drawn a line in the sand against NFTs in Minecraft, saying in an update posted today that NFT integration with the game is "generally not something we will support or allow."

The update begins with a quick rundown of what NFTs are, including a note about their extreme volatility, before laying out the current policies on Minecraft servers. The overall goal of those policies, Mojang said, is "to ensure that Minecraft remains a community where everyone has access to the same content." NFTs, on the other hand, are specifically designed to "create models of scarcity and exclusion," which obviously conflicts with that principle. And so, they're out.

"To ensure that Minecraft players have a safe and inclusive experience, blockchain technologies are not permitted to be integrated inside our client and server applications, nor may Minecraft in-game content such as worlds, skins, persona items, or other mods, be utilized by blockchain technology to create a scarce digital asset," Mojang wrote.

The update was apparently prompted by the fact that numerous Minecraft-associated NFTs and play-to-earn servers are already available, taking advantage of the gap in official policy and dividing the community into "the haves and the have-nots," Mojang said.

Also a matter of concern is that some NFTs "may not be reliable and may end up costing players who buy them," which is a remarkably polite way of putting it: The unofficial Minecraft NFT game Blockverse, which disappeared with more than $1.2 million in January, is just one of many examples of NFT-related malfeasance and criminality we've seen over the past few years. This is particularly relevant to Minecraft because its audience tends to skew younger than many other games, and is thus likely more susceptible to scams. 

The official Minecraft usage guidelines are being updated to address the matter in detail, but the short, bottom-line version is a hard no: "NFTs associated with any in-game content, including worlds, skins, persona items, or other mods" are strictly disallowed. 

That's not necessarily the end of it: Mojang said it will continue to monitor the evolution of blockchain technology to determine whether it will "enable more secure experiences or other practical and inclusive applications in gaming," suggesting that official support could be possible at some point in the future. For now, though, "we have no plans of implementing blockchain technology into Minecraft."

The creator of Dead or Alive Tomonobu Itagaki has announced the name of his new company—Apex Game Studios—along with its first project. And… well, it's NFTs.

Warrior, the first game from Itagaki's new studio, promises a "3A" fantasy MMO experience that looks like it's based around a Pokémon-style system of collecting and battling "mob servants", each of which is an NFT. If that sounds a little sparse on detail, it's probably because the bulk of Warrior's website and press release instead centres on a bunch of verbiage about the  Web3 (that is to say, blockchain) technology that underpins the whole thing.

Indeed, Warrior's players can delight in an experience that "aims to solve the performance, security and sustainability issues of GameFi 1.0" through the game's in-built token system. These "Warrior Diamond Tokens" allow the trade of practically "all the assets that players obtain in the game."

In simpler terms, that pretty much means your ownership of in-game items and cosmetics is going to be registered on a blockchain, and can then be traded around with other players like assets on a commodity market. How Warrior intends to solve the performance, security, and sustainability issues of GameFi—or 'play-to-earn'—development is left very vague. Outside of references to a "multi-chain" framework, there's not much to indicate whether Warrior will run on an environmentally costly 'proof of work' system, or something a little greener.

Itagaki's ambitions don't end there. Once the NFT-based Warrior is out of the way, Apex Game Studios plan to try their hand at making games in the Metaverse, just as soon as someone figures out what that actually means.

The whole announcement reads like Deutsche Bank and Blizzard double-booked a conference room and just decided to present simultaneously, and it's hard not to be a bit skeeved-out by it. Everything about Warrior so far is big on "here's how we're going to generate a self-sustaining economic engine" and light on "here's how we're going to make a game anyone wants to play." Considering that we're still in the wake of a crypto crash and a flatlining NFT market, it's difficult to see it panning out positively for anyone. And it's sad to see another once-great creator join the gold rush.