How Gamers Beat NFTs

Nick Kaman’s video game development studio, Aggro Crab, has tied its image closely to making fun of cryptocurrency. Its first major game, Going Under, is a broad satire of capitalism and startup culture, full of gags about the gig economy, data mining, and the blockchain. “A third of the game is us just attacking crypto,” he says. “That was the whole joke.” One level requires players to traverse a dungeon where workers physically mine a substance called Styxcoin for their boss, the ferryman Hu$tlebone$. (Upon his defeat, a message flashes across the screen: ASSET LIQUIDATED.) So Kaman was alarmed earlier this year when he learned from Twitter that Aggro Crab’s publisher, the equivalent of a record label in the games industry, had become the latest to try selling nonfungible tokens. The NFTs would cost players real money and, he said, cost him both customers and his self-respect.

“We believe NFTs cannot be environmentally friendly, or useful, and really are just an overall f---ing grift,” Kaman and his co-founder, Caelan Pollock, said hours later in a joint statement condemning the decision. They pledged to sever the studio’s relationship with the publisher, Team17 Group Plc, unless Team17 abandoned its planned tokens, a collection of cutesy cartoon invertebrates called MetaWorms, based on a long-running series about annelids with heavy artillery. In case the studio logo of a frowning crab holding a knife left anything to the imagination, they closed with “I f---ing hate it here.”