Yanis Varoufakis wasn’t solely working at Gabe Newell’s company, as he later became Greece’s Minister of Finance. In his interview with Crypto Syllabus, he also talked about the pay-to-earn concept and the blockchain’s long-term impacts.

He had access to the Steam player-to-player marketplace data in the early 2010s, which he used to advise Valve while also using this information for his research. “Ten years ago, the metaverse was already up and running within gaming communities. Valve’s games had already spawned economies so large that Valve was both excited and spooked. Some digital assets that had previously been distributed for free (via the game’s drops) began to trade for tens of thousands of dollars on eBay, well before anyone had thought of NFTs. What if the prices of these spontaneously lucrative items and activities were to crash? That was what kept the people at Valve awake at night,” Varioufakis said.

He then went on to be critical about the metaverse: “Today, a decade later, it is clear that gaming communities like the one I studied at Valve have been operating as fully-fledged metaverses (to use Zuckerberg’s term). Gamers were drawn to them by the game but, once ‘inside’, they stayed to live out a large part of their life, making friends, producing goods for sale, consuming entertainment, debating, etc. Zuckerberg’s ambition is to insert his billions of Facebook non-gamer users into a Steam-like digital social economy – complete with a top-down platform currency that he controls. How can I resist the parallelism with a digital fiefdom in which Zuckerberg dreams of being the techno-lord?”

The pay-to-earn critique goes even more profound: “The idea that people must now play like robots to earn a living to be human in their spare time is, indeed, the apotheosis of misanthropy.” This thought should be an alarming short to both Square Enix and Ubisoft, two gaming companies eagerly expecting a ton of cash off NFTs. (The latter already has its platform, Quartz.)

And he’s an expert in the subject… so if Varoufakis has such a comment, it can’t end up under the rug.

Source: PCGamer