Thread by @larsiusprime

People say there's a coming "crypto culture war", but there's actually TWO.

The first is external -- crypto maxis versus normies -- with the first front in the game world, where traditional gamers and gamedevs are putting up pretty fierce resistance.

The second is internal

Crypto gaming projects are seriously lacking experienced game dev talent, but skeptical game developers (my own tribe, more or less) are mostly not willing to work on crypto projects -- many refuse to on principle and those that don't risk alienating their friends and colleagues

People coming from crypto land severely underestimate how deep the distrust and disgust coming from traditional game developers can be. Like friends and colleagues will block you for openly working on these projects. Hiring trad. game devs is going to require hazard pay.

Then there's the gamers themselves, and we've seen how vocally they rejected discord. Now, that is the vocal highly online segment, but you're going to contend with them one way or the other.

Now let's talk about the INTERNAL crypto culture war.

This is INSIDE the crypto gaming sphere, and it's between the idealist cypherpunks who truly want max decentralization, and those who frankly don't care so much and are making mostly centralized blockchain-flavored apps

The former not only won't blink at making their whole stack open source, they'll take that as table stakes. The latter will release a closed source app with terms of service that explicitly claw back all the promises that the blockchain (and their own marketing) implies.

Some rhetorical tips if you're coming from crypto-land and trying to win over traditional game developers:

Numero Uno: Don't say, "You hate crypto, but you're okay with Free to Play?"

This is a complete failure of audience analysis. Rank and file gamedevs lost the F2P wars.

F2P is here to stay and there's not much anyone can do about it anymore, we've all made our peace with it in one way or another. There are in fact some ethical implementations of it that are basically fine, but also many horrendously exploitative models that run rampant.

But that decision was generally made above the heads of your rank and file game developers -- the people coding and art-ing and making these games -- and they didn't get a vote. Many didn't like it but didn't have a choice not to follow the industry winds if they wanted a job.

Numero dos: don't attribute resistance to a hidebound mindset that hates innovation and disruption.

Gamedevs LOVE innovation. We love playing with new toys and new tech. It's why we're in game development!

And disrupt old business models? YES PLEASE!

Have you been on a game dev mailing list before? Do you know what we talk about all day? How much we hate the status quo business model. How much we wish there was a different one. How much we wish we could change things.

But we are skeptics because we are above average at math and we have been burned before and we lost the F2P wars and this isn't the first time folks from outside have come in and tried to sell us something that smelled weird.

You know what the real red flag is? Almost nobody pitching this tech actually wants to talk shop about game design and games. It's all DAO this and yield that, tokenomics and whitepapers.

That's a big red flag to a game developer.

The thing you need to understand about game developers is that we (mostly intentionally) made the WORST choice for making money/having good work conditions, given our technical skills.

You can get way better pay and treatment doing webdev or generalized "boring" software work.

So walking up to a game developer and talking finance bro jargon is basically the worst first impression you could possibly give

Here's a final point to consider -- right now a lot of gamedevs are just straight up mad that there's easy money for NFT game projects, but not for regular games. Right now an NFT whitepaper stapled to a cocktail napkin sketch of Farmville can get millions in funding overnight.

And I get it, it's kind of VC's job to just throw money away at projects that are probably stupid in case one of them turns out to be STUPID AWESOME and 10x's or 100x's or whatever, and this same incentive means 'don't ever invest in boring safe stuff that will only 1.1x'

To be clear, this thread is really not about me -- I'm a consultant now, I no longer rely on my games to support me (though I still work on them).

I'm just trying to give you a glimpse into the mind of all the gamedevs I know, this is their world.

Here, I'll end this with a concession to crypto-land:
A few months ago I was dismissive, and I shouldn't have been. There's a lot to learn about this field. However.

The majority of you really, really, don't understand gamedev. You are reinventing a LOT of wheels, and poorly.

There are so many hard-won lessons that gamedevs have worked out over the last ... 30? 40? Years? Gamedev is actually really super old. Deep lessons, and there's so much pain to be spared if you learn them.

And that's kind of my plea here. Really come at this from a place of humility and learning rather than bravado and bluster and an air of sweeping revolution everyone ought to be grateful for.

And maybe, just maybe, consider whether you actually need blockchain to pull off whatever it is you're trying to do.