Dr Disrespect thinks NFT games are the future
Call of Duty streamer Herschel “Dr Disrespect” Beahm is no stranger to controversy, despite being one of the most popular streamers on YouTube. Now, he’s seemingly gone all-in on NFT games, calling digital collectibles “exciting” and lashing out at people who weren’t on board.
In a series of tweets, Herschel “Dr Disrespect” Beahm invited his followers to imagine “extract” in a game with a digital collectible worth $100,000, saying that the entertainment value as a viewer would be exciting. He also suggested that they could be coming to his game, set up to be a Call of Duty competitor after he called Warzone 2.0 “stupid”.
“Imagine trying to ‘extract’ with an item you discovered worth $100,000 on the chain,” Beahm said, “Think about entertainment value as a viewer let alone player. A new pvp experience is upon us…”
Dr Disrespect is working on his own extraction shooter, which will contain NFTs.
Dr Disrespect
He continued: “The concept of digital collectibles in an online game is so exciting to me. Especially an extraction type of game. People saying scam and ‘ugh’ are just brain dead headline followers. Same people that spend a ton on skins for an annual release game. Same skins everyone has too.”
Followers in the replies weren’t so keen on the idea, pushing back against the idea of NFTs in games. One follower wrote: “Ugh, NFT/blockchain gaming? I thought you were better than that. Was looking forward to your game, should’ve known better when you dropped exclusive NFT tokens for it lol.”
Beahm simply responded “What an idiot”.
When asked to explain the value of having digital items stored on a blockchain, rather than a centralized server, Beahm suggested that one could have a digital collectible with functionality in multiple different games, even years after the fact. He declined to answer subsequent tweets asking why developers would bother implementing content from other games in their games without getting paid for it.
Even if Dr Disrespect’s idea were a good one, developers have spoken time and time again about why trying to implement one item across multiple games is unfeasible. One particularly notable example comes courtesy of a thread from independent developer Rami Ismail, who says that even very basic objects in a game can be difficult to implement across different games and engines.
Needless to say, video game development is much more complex than many people believe, and finding a catch-all solution to content interoperability is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Still, Dr Disrespect seems to be intent on trying, so only time will tell if it’s successful, or if it will crash and burn like many other NFT games before it.
