absolutely agreed

for me, the biggest issue with the fairphone is that they attempted to embrace everything: modular, sustainable, fair trade, etc

their competitors do none of that, so the quality/cost ratio turns out way off and that prevents their market share to grow sustainably (pun intended). the few people I know who use it, are the profile that is used to do sacrifices like that (like buying sustainable food at large markups, etc) but that’s not feasible or desirable to the vast majority

imo they should have picked a concept and perfected it - preferably the modular part which is the best thing you can do and brings tangible value to users. then move on to the other things… that’s a great cautionary tale about trying to be the good guys in capitalism, the system is not in their favour

oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m also all against the exchange of game items with real money (specially when it affects gameplay). in my view, you could only ever put 2 “real currencies” into a game: time or money. though everyone is roughly at the same playing field for time (I understand there’s a contrast between a well off kid vs a hard worker adult) people are born with absurd differences in wealth, so much that the game itself becomes meaningless when that factor is introduced (the so called p2w).

when I say “amazing” I am talking about non-p2w mmorpgs - otherwise is just plain old capitalism hehe. the concept of grinding can be very interesting in the sense that it adds risk to the gameplay, in this case the risk of wasting time. basically all non-p2w games implement this risk in different ways: if you die in Mario it’s the time to the start of the level/checkpoint (seconds), in WoW is time attributed to a few gold coins/respawn walk (minutes), in games like Tibia you lose 10% of all your progress (sometimes amounting to months/years). I’ve been a lifelong mmorpg player and one thing I realised is that the more you have to lose, the more thrilling the game becomes and the more immersive it gets (at a big cost, sometimes your own sanity).

I do agree with the things you and the Sega guys are bringing up. NFT and decentralisation of authority over game items allows that and doesn’t add anything nice. imo, the only viable and fair monetisation for any game is retail and subscription models

well one could argue that production costs aren’t necessarily reflected in the product’s final value, which is dictated by society (for its usefulness, desirability, status power, etc)

this is very evident precisely in fictional digital game objects, but in the online game context. a powerful item can give you advantages over other players and be very valuable but cost 0 to be created by the company. of course it’s just a flipped bit nevertheless, but there’s no way around to cheat and flip it at will

mmorpgs exist merely because of this concept. the whole level, skill, item grinding turns man-hours of work into bits in an authoritative server somewhere, and for that they have value. it’s an amazing thing to watch