Okay, so let’s say you have a digital thing which can be reproduced infinitely because that’s the way the world works and that’s just kind of what happens with digital products. However, you have dreams of being a Scrooge McDuck-style robber baron that desperately needs something to dive into in order to feel, thus you need to prove you absolutely straight up own that thing and no one else does or can, damn the consequences. Big Tech has provided you that solution with NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. In theory, this is like having a baseball card. In execution, it is like you used your neighborhood’s power to excavate a hole in your backyard to mold a baseball card out of the dirt from the hole.
Now let’s say you’re Sega and you do okay for yourself. Persona is big, Yakuza is cleaning critical clocks, someone somewhere played that Sakura Wars game probably, you have no need to engage in tomfoolery. But then you think, wait, what if I want to engage in tomfoolery because it could produce a small personal profit? And that brings us to today, where Sega has announced a new initiative to sell NFTs.
“SEGA Co., Ltd. will start selling NFT digital contents utilizing blockchain technology in collaboration with double jump.tokyo Co., Ltd. around the summer of 2021,” the company said through a translated Japanese post on their website. The release went on to mention that Sega is rich in classic IPs with music and art that can be sold to fans in the form of NFTs.
Are these tokens fungible? Hell no! Does that make any of this a good idea? Also hell no!
NFTs aren’t the end of the world, they’re just one more thing we’re doing to hasten the end of the world. In that sense, it’s really disappointing to see Sega jump on the bandwagon for a thing that doesn’t actually make them that much money. They could have just as easily not done this and still been fine.
Maybe they need a “Hey kids, Sonic here” Earth Day message to really grasp what’s going on.
