Historic sale of a Gala Games Fantasy MMORPG in-game NFT item for US$800K

So this is some kind of blockchain thing? The article just kind of dives in and I’m lacking context, but it seems interesting. Can anyone give a brief overview?

Sounds like whale-catching mobile games on a much bigger scale; Create a fake world with a bunch of fake restrictions, line up a bunch of bored computer nerds, get them to feel superior over one another by demonstrating their wealth with the purchase of expensive bits and bytes.

The cryptocurrency talk is just the mumbo jumbo to catch the idiots. It’s like those alternative healthcare practitioners who sprinkle in the words “study” and “research” to make their quackery sound legit to the unsuspecting.

I'll try, but I'm not a fan, so I may get it wrong and/or fail to disguise my (negative) feelings.

Imagine an MMORPG that uses a blockchain economy not only for currency transactions but also for secure storage of items. Today, we take for granted the 'vault' space offered in games, but by storing items and currency both on the blockchain, new opportunities for in-app purchase become available that players will surely enjoy interacting with.

In this article, a 'bank' is sold for $800,000 USD, and the purchaser of that 'bank' will, presumably, get a fractional share of the revenue from all 'vault this item' paid transactions. Since payment can occur either using in-game currency and/or real money transactions, and presuming they get a blockchain currency listed on Coinbase, the owner of the castle will be able to cash out their revenue stream into their real world bank account.

I'm probably missing some subtle aspect of the specifics here, but that's what I took away from it. I assume the creator of the game is hoping that the SEC will not realize that this is an $800,000 investment in a public offering of stock in their still-vaporware game. I also assume that by taking advantage of the Coinbase tax-paperwork infrastructure, the game's operators will attempt to have no legal obligation to register as a financial institution, or otherwise owe any regulatory debt.

You may find value in reading the novel 'REAMDE' as it spends some amount of time walking through the implications of a world where you can earn real money using virtual gameplay.

Man, I really don't get the point of this. (And I mean the game in general, not just the sale of this franchise.) It's like blockchain play-acting.

Using a blockchain to track the status of objects which only exist within an online game, and which are only accessible within that game, makes no sense to me. Ultimately, the status of those objects is subject to the whims of the game and its operator, not the blockchain -- since they control the rules of the game. If they want to make the game stop recognizing your "property", or change what it represents in game, that's always something they can do; throwing a blockchain at it doesn't change that.

Also: I can't help but feel really suspicious about a game whose primary feature appears to be its monetization strategy, rather than its gameplay. (Read the rest of the blog -- there's virtually nothing in there about what the game actually is!) Does anyone actually play these games to have fun, or is it just a way for cryptocurrency fans to find even more esoteric things to invest in?

A bit of an overview of the game here:

https://egamers.io/this-new-mmorpg-sells-5-citadels-for-1-36...