Avenged Sevenfold’s M. Shadows: It’s ‘Insane’ What We Pay for Items in Games Like Fortnite

Matt Sanders (a.ok.a. M. Shadows) is the lead vocalist for heavy steel band Avenged Sevenfold. However he’s much more than only a well-known metalhead: he’s additionally a gamer, a CryptoPunk, and one of many minds behind the band’s 2014 dungeon crawler PC role-playing recreation known as Hail to the King: Deathbat.

On the most recent episode of Decrypt’s gm podcast, Sanders shared his perspective on video video games that leverage crypto and NFTs—and took a powerful stance towards so-called “specialists” rallying towards Web3 expertise.

“I’m a gamer, so I perceive digital items,” he mentioned of his early affinity for purely digital property. “I perceive that there’s a shortage to it.”

Sanders was comparatively early to crypto, and mentioned he purchased Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin round 2016. However he was additionally early to NFTs, and have become enamored with the early CryptoPunks neighborhood.

“This was a really refined, forward-thinking group of individuals,” he mentioned of the CryptoPunks Discord server. “I actually discovered so much from them. And I turned mates with a variety of them in actual life.”

Sanders has immersed himself in crypto and gaming—and sees the 2 as a pure match. Like many NFT advocates, he is not content material with paying huge bucks for digital objects within the closed, “walled backyard” ecosystems of conventional on-line video video games.

“It’s insane that we pay the cash we pay for the skins,” he mentioned of beauty objects in non-crypto video games like battle royale shooter Fortnite.

In Counter-Strike: World Offensive (CS:GO), beauty weapon skins can promote for anyplace from tons of of {dollars} to six-figure sums on the secondary market—however they solely work in CS:GO. And in lots of video games, like Fortnite, these bought objects can solely be resold in so-called “grey markets” that will violate the sport writer’s phrases of service.

Like many players who’re open to the chances of NFTs and crypto in video video games, Sanders believes that making such high-value objects simply sellable and transferable raises the stakes of video games to the following stage. He raised the chance that some might search to use such economies, however predicts that tech options might be developed.

“It might be scary-cool,” he mentioned of a attainable blockchain recreation with excessive stakes, “or it might be simply merely what our youngsters are doing.” 

He echoed a sentiment shared by prime crypto gaming business gamers like Gala Video games, Solana, and Magic Eden: The following era of tokenized video games really must be enjoyable, and no quantity of crypto rewards or incentives could make a foul recreation good.

“It’s a must to have a terrific recreation first. It might probably’t be, ‘Oh, we’re an NFT recreation, and right here’s our recreation,'” Sanders mentioned. “It must be, ‘It is a nice recreation, and everybody needs to play.'”

He’s additionally not the most important fan of crypto jargon like “Web3 gaming,” and argued that such phrases can create confusion and branding points. As a substitute, the singer needs to see content material and utility delivered to the foreground. Nonetheless, he didn’t mince phrases when requested in regards to the broader backlash towards NFTs in gaming.

“There’s simply pushback in all places,” he mentioned, including that mainstream media has harpooned all of crypto with “specialists” that don’t really perceive the tech.

“People are storytelling, narrative-based issues, proper? They want a narrative, they should have a story, they rally behind issues, they usually’re very tribal,” Sanders argued. “What’s taking place now’s every little thing is working towards this narrative of, ‘This can assist you.’ And so it is turn into so robust that there is simply gonna need to be some very nice use circumstances.”