'It's pretty tragic' - Slime Rancher 2 game director won't be doing NFTs
We recently got the chance to chat with Nick Popovich, game director on Slime Rancher 2 — a game with a clear eco-friendly message. You’re not in its world to do harm, and the most successful players learn how to live in harmony with its ecosystem of smiling slimes.
That’s the opposite of NFTs, which are digital receipts for digital goods, all traded with cryptocurrency. The Ethereum cryptocurrency platform uses 48.14 kilowatt-hours of energy per transaction. Every day, there are thousands of transactions, and this number will only increase as more companies jump on the bandwagon.
To give you something to measure that against, the average US household uses 28.9 kWh per day. It’s also entirely unnecessary – you don’t need NFTs to sell digital art, and every other application of the tech suggested so far is either unworkable or could be done without burning down the rainforests. A single Ethereum transaction uses almost double the energy of 100,000 Visa transactions.
Basically, any NFT group claiming to be “carbon neutral” because they plant some trees is like a serial killer promising to have a baby a year to offset all the murder stuff.
“No,” Popovich replied when jokingly asked if his company planned to so any Slime Rancher 2 NFTs. “I think I’ve made my stance pretty clear on that. It’s pretty tragic. The truth of it is, any new technology, you know it has value or that it’s worth pursuing when you see people doing it just for the sake of doing it.
“With NFTs, you can see there is nothing but money motivating it. There are a lot of things in the world in which nothing but money motivates, and I totally get that. But this is a thing that doesn’t need to exist, and it actually ends up doing harm to us for it to exist. It’s just to create money and status online. And it’s obviously a terrible pyramid scheme, but I digress.
“I just think, in terms of keeping your eyes open on stuff like this, look for the things that people are into doing just because they exist, and they would do it for nothing, or they would do it even though it costs them greatly. That’s when you know there’s something there. Because we as people just want to explore that and not just use other people to profit off and burn a whole bunch of trees down in the process.”
Video game actor Troy Baker recently came under fire for endorsing NFTs. Retailer GameSpot has also entered the eco destruction arena, Square Enix has shown interest in NFTs, and Ubisoft has already tried to make them work with in-game helmets. It’s good to know that not every company is willing to hop on this new money-making trend without considering the consequences.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.