Yuga Labs releases a small piece of a NFT/Web3 game: HV-MTL

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

Summary

Yuga Labs is a Web3/Crypto company that raised about half a billion dollar in VC capital and by selling links to JPG of procedurally generated monkeys. Since then:

• Yuga Labs released it's own company scrip $APE
• there was a burger shop that for a short while sold very expensive burgers for Yuga Labs company scrips,
• Yuga Labs released a very bad browser game, in which players paid up to 4000$ for someone to get an high score and that was exploited on day one
• Yuga labs sold lots more links to procedurally generated jpgs of monkeys to raise more capital. 

Yuga Labs declares that it will one day release Otherside, a MMO/Web3/Metaverse that will definitely make the links to jpgs of monkeys worth more than what early adopters paid for them. Meanwhile, the links to the monkey jpgs have lost about 88% price in the secondary market, from its all time high.

 

In the process of building Matrix/Ready Player One, Yuga Labs has released a little piece of another Web3 browser game, to sell more links to jpgs and raise more capital. HV-MTL. The game seems like it could potentially become a kind of base building crafting game like Clash of Clans with a futuristic aesthetics, with some elements, like the character, sitting on a blockchain and doubling as access token for the game.

Quotes

Quote

There are a total of 30,000 different mech NFTs, each with different traits like wings, weapons, and wheels—and each provides full access to the newly-launched HV-MTL Forge game.

The game tasks players with creating a forge and keeping their HV character happy and productive. Once you create the space and its items, you can submit it for voting. If the community likes what you’ve done, you can climb in the social leaderboards and get energy for the game’s tasks.

In the future, as early as August, you’ll be able to use that energy to play the rogue-like dungeon crawler game that uses the characters you’ve created.

My thoughts

Yuga Labs couldn't even be bothered to make it a Monkey themed Clash of Clans with banana plantation and sewers. Yuga's customers paid half a billion to get monkey pictures, they got a bad browser game they paid others to play, and the next game is not even about monkeys, but it's about robots... 

But fear not, you too can play this little piece of what might become a game for about 1000$. Just 15 times the price of starfield!

 

Yuga Labs raised half a billion dollars, and only managed to make bottom of the barrel browser games so far. Just to put thing in perspective:

• Newgrounds make vastly superior free to play browser games (with a insignificant fraction of the resources)
• GTA5 costed a quarter of a billion dollar to make, half of the resources Yuga Labs got

Yuga Labs is obviously never remaking the Matrix/Ready Player One (not that that's even a desirable outcome).

Yuga Labs has proven very good at selling unfathomably overpriced links to jpg pictures.

 

On a technology level, each product released that uses Blockchain proves the rule of thumb that using Blockchain adds an overhead of about 1000X in term of development costs while performing significantly worse and taking about 1000X to be completed than if it was made using proven technology, in the rare case a product is actually launched. E.g. Logan Paul failed to develop Crypto Zoo after well over one million dollar in funding and 12 months of development while a single developer was able to make a working version in a few hours just dropping the Blockchain requirements.

 

Sources

https://decrypt.co/resources/yugas-hv-mtl-forge-beginners-guide-need-bored-ape-nfts-play

[Needfuldoer]

12 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

Summary

Yuga Labs is a Web3/Crypto company that raised about half a billion dollar in VC capital and by selling links to JPG of procedurally generated monkeys. Since then:

• Yuga Labs released it's own company scrip $APE
• there was a burger shop that for a short while sold very expensive burgers for Yuga Labs company scrips,
• Yuga Labs released a very bad browser game, in which players paid up to 4000$ for someone to get an high score and that was exploited on day one
• Yuga labs sold lots more links to procedurally generated jpgs of monkeys to raise more capital. 

Yuga Labs declares that it will one day release Otherside, a MMO/Web3/Metaverse

I only have one thing to say about this:

 

 

12 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

My thoughts

Yuga Labs raised half a billion dollars, and only managed to make bottom of the barrel browser games so far. Just to put thing in perspective:

• Newgrounds make vastly superior free to play browser games (with a insignificant fraction of the resources)
• GTA5 costed a quarter of a billion dollar to make, half of the resources Yuga Labs got

Yuga Labs is obviously never remaking the Matrix/Ready Player One (not that that's even a desirable outcome).

Yuga Labs has proven very good at selling unfathomably overpriced links to jpg pictures.

 

On a technology level, each product released that uses Blockchain proves the rule of thumb that using Blockchain adds an overhead of about 1000X in term of development costs while performing significantly worse and taking about 1000X to be completed than if it was made using proven technology, in the rare case a product is actually launched. E.g. Logan Paul failed to develop Crypto Zoo after well over one million dollar in funding and 12 months of development while a single developer was able to make a working version in a few hours just dropping the Blockchain requirements.

Yeah, but the BLOCKCHAIN, man! Blockchain will solve all technological problems! Somehow! 

[WereCat]

5 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

Yeah, but the BLOCKCHAIN, man! Blockchain will solve all technological problems! Somehow! 

Did someone say BLOCKCHAIN?

 

That will be $20. I accept Pay Pal as well.

[SorryBella]

Corporation talking about blockchain really puts the block in "block button" for me.

[Sauron]

All of these are invariably scams, 99% of the money was likely pocketed by the developers and they delivered the bare minimum product to have deniability.

1 hour ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

E.g. Logan Paul failed to develop Crypto Zoo after well over one million dollar in funding and 12 months of development while a single developer was able to make a working version in a few hours just dropping the Blockchain requirements.

That's because it, too, was a scam intended first and foremost to make money where actually developing anything was just an afterthought.

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

That's because it, too, was a scam intended first and foremost to make money where actually developing anything was just an afterthought

I agree, but there are still proponents of Blockchain (bag holders of monkey jpg) that believe in a non fraudulent future for blockchain technology (to sell bags of monkey jpg). I make a point of evaluating the rare released Blockchain products as actual products, not as speculative schemes. This leave only two conclusions:

• The developers are grossly incompetent developers
• The developers are wildly successful con artists

I leave to courtrooms posterity the judgment of Yuga labs.

[Monkey Dust]

I appreciate that blockchain tech will have some proper uses, but 99% of the space just seems to be pyramid scheme bullshit.

[Kisai]

4 hours ago, Monkey Dust said:

I appreciate that blockchain tech will have some proper uses, but 99% of the space just seems to be pyramid scheme bullshit.

Technology tends to take three routes:

 

Route A: It's most useful for porn before it gains legitimacy, pushed by personal interests

See VHS camcorders. See the internet (porn was popular with usenet and IRC before it ever got onto the web.)

 

Route B: It's most useful for piracy before it gains legitimacy, pushed by business interests

See camcorders, peer to peer file sharing (torrents), video sharing, music sharing

 

Route C: It's only used by the worst people to perpetuate scams, and has a hard time gaining legitimacy until government regulates it.

Social media, bitcoin, ethereum, AI generated-anything (GPT, TTS, Deepfakes, Music, etc) 

 

It's rarely "thing was invented for a good purpose, and then co-opted by bad actors", it's always "thing was intended for a singular purpose that scope-creeped it's way into being used by bad actors before good actors find the right use for it."

 

Like you can see this evolution with Youtube. It was originally route B, It was used primarily to share "cool things", and then the pirates got really interested in using it before they finally got thrown off the platform by ContentID and now it's generally "hard" to find pirated material on it by accident, and only if you're looking for it.

 

However a lot of Crypto stuff and AI stuff is falling into Route C: Where the worst people in the world (eg criminals) are using it to perpetuate money laundering and scams before governments figure out how to regulate it.

 

Like NFT's was really something that "might have had utility" had it been not been paired with procedurally generated garbage and people stealing artwork from everywhere to "mint" on Ethereum, thus Ethereum is not trustable and not a legitimate system in the eyes of artists. If you mention NFT or AI artwork, you just get straight up blocked by a lot of artists. See an ape avatar? blocked. Ethereum's price is a bubble because of these idiots. Bitcoin's price is a bubble because it's use for money laundering. Pretty much every crypto coin, nft and ai-generated content is pure grift at it's core, and if you are caught with any of them without disclosing it, you will be labeled a scammer. Because it's very likely true. To say nothing about the combined GPU scalping and energy theft by people involved in it, did nothing to improve the image of crypto.

 

I'm thinking there's probably 3 years left in the crypto-coin asset bubbles and then anyone left holding it when the government regulates things it to require physical asset liquidity in order to be traded for real money is going to abandoning it.

 

[Needfuldoer]

13 hours ago, Kisai said:

Route A: It's most useful for porn before it gains legitimacy, pushed by personal interests

See VHS camcorders

There was porn on Betamax, too. Sony had no control over the content released on their format.

 

VHS won the format war because RCA needed a videocassette format to sell (after they ignored videotape in favor of the CED, which took almost 20 years to come to fruition). RCA knew 'Muricans would want to record an entire football game, and neither format was long enough, so they asked for a long play mode. JVC was willing to make it happen, Sony was not (because they're Sony and they know better).

 

That's why there were Matsushita-manufactured, RCA-branded VHS decks with the SelectaVision brand name on them in the late 70s.

[Kisai]

7 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

There was porn on Betamax, too. Sony had no control over the content released on their format.

 

VHS won the format war because RCA needed a videocassette format to sell (after they ignored videotape in favor of the CED, which took almost 20 years to come to fruition). RCA knew 'Muricans would want to record an entire football game, and neither format was long enough, so they asked for a long play mode. JVC was willing to make it happen, Sony was not (because they're Sony and they know better).

 

That's why there were Matsushita-manufactured, RCA-branded VHS decks with the SelectaVision brand name on them in the late 70s.

The point being that the "Early adoption" of tech is either, porn, piracy or money laundering. It's not exclusively one thing, but one of these is always the driver.

 

For most of the internet's existence, porn and piracy was the driver after ARPAnet. Usenet was notorous for both, and usenet predates the web. usenet was also wonderfully useless for any actual "forum" like experiences because the usenet topology made moderating essentially impossible. 

 

For those not old enough to know what usenet was. Usenet was  essentially a decentralized, anonymous forum designed like email. you can send any message with any email address, and spammers would often just scrape previously used email addresses and send spam with them. So most of the alt.fan.* type discussions were just flooded with garbage by the time people moved to early social media platforms like myspace. 

 

IRC, was ALWAYS a darknet (let's call it the predecessor to discord, because it's pretty much the same idea and uses a lot of the same lingo) where things would happen on IRC, and be completely invisible to the rest of the internet. IRC was notorious for having piles of CEI forums usually at the top of the channel lists, and plenty of other software piracy channels. Usually the biggest channels on IRC were piracy-related. As bandwidth's got larger, and P2P protocols became far more accessable, IRC became mostly a place to grab 0-day stuff (Eg cammed films, leaked retail copies of software, games and movies, etc) to redistribute to torrents and stuff.

 

The IRC could never legitimatize itself because it would overwhelmingly be taken over by piracy or porn, but porn was very difficult to actually distribute over IRC because there was no way to preview what the heck you were downloading, where as a game or movie you could usually just look up a trailer.

 

Like if there were pillars of the piracy, IRC and Usenet were the two central pillars to piracy before Napster and Kazaa. After those services died, you had a bunch more "decentralized" P2P systems like winmx, emule, etc, before finally bittorrent which separated the actual "index" from the data, which made it much harder to anti-piracy efforts to combat it. After all, if the people sharing the magnet links on IRC were simply sharing it with each other, it wasn't leaking out to the piratebay. No, someone else would re-encode it and put up a different link to the piratebay. 

 

Which let's fast forward and look at the other side of things.

 

You know what destroys a technology the fastest?

 

Ads.

 

The introduction of ads on a previously ad-free service means it's already in it's death throes. Ads on a service you are already paying a subscription for? even worse. You can see online newspapers already in end-stage death, having fired all their content creators, and putting ads in between every paragraph of text.

 

There are far too many "ad placements" so instead of having 1 good ad placement that you can demand a high CPM for, you have dozens of ad placements that undermine the entire page's reading experience.

 

Ads, have become synonymous with "garbage service"

 

All the BS web3 stuff in the world is not going to fix that. We've all been through the decentralized wringer before. It's technology that doesn't work as long as ISP's can keep their hands on your wallets. Until the idea of paying for bandwidth consumption goes away, decentralized technology will be only for businesses who are big enough to have zero-rated peering arrangements with internet backbones. 

 

So facebook, apple, amazon and google are big enough to make these arrangements for themselves.

[williamcll]

FTC is going to have a wild day with this.

[DuckDodgers]

The whole cryptocurrency industry only proved that the chronic problems with the finance and banking come from the bottomless well of greed and fear in man's soul. No amount of high-tech hype can solve the lust for money, for it is the root of all evil.