First W3C Games CG workshop entirely dedicated to blockchain and NFTs in web games happened online on Tuesday March 29th with the unusual number of attendees.

During the W3C’s Next Generation Monetisation workshop that we had in January, most of the topics and discussions around them were drifting towards blockchain and NFTs, so we decided to talk about ”everything but crypto” back then, and do the next one about blockchain and NFTs specifically, which happened last week.

Interestingly enough, this event had the least number of participants since the very beginning of our regular gatherings at TPAC in 2020. It was only six of us: organizers François Daoust and Noël Meudec, me, and guests Paul Gadi, Richard Davey, and Rachel Yager. It was quite sad to not see other regular participants from big companies, engine creators, browser vendors, game publishers - they should be embracing this new trend instead of ignoring it completely and pretending it doesn’t exist.

Anyway, we had some interesting discussions mostly thanks to Paul, who have solid knowledge and vast experience in the topic. Projects like Arcadians NFT (where the entire profit went directly to open source game engines, initiatives, and communities) serve as a prime example against ”every NFT is a scam”, which sadly is the common opinion by many folks in the community.

We agreed that the blockchain technology is as good (or bad) as we make it, and even though there are many bad actors, we should not bother ourselves too much with negativity and keep doing what we’re doing, especially if we truly believe in making the whole ecosystem better.