Phil Spencer: 'Play-to-Earn Specifically is something I'm Cautious About' - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 01 September 2022 / 3,284 Views
Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer in an interview with Bloomberg was asked about how he felt about play-to-earn. He is being "cautious" about it as it creates a workforce from players.
"Play-to-earn specifically is something I'm cautious about," Spencer said. "It creates a worker force out of players, for certain players to kind of monetize.
"Now, to be fair for us in the games industry, this has existed for years and years. There have been gold farmers of people who literally just spend their time doing some menial task in a game to accrue some currency, that they could then sell to some other rich player and for real money so that person doesn't have to spend their time. But now you find games that are starting to build that into the economy of the game itself."
Spencer also mentioned Mojang's statement on how the developer would not allow NFTs or blackchain technologies to be in Minecraft.
"We made some comments in Minecraft about how we view NFTs in this space, because we saw people doing things that we thought were exploitative in our product and we said we don't want that," he said.
"I think sometimes it's a hammer looking for a nail when these technologies come up. But the actual human use, or player use, in our case, of these technologies. I think there could be some interesting things."
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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