Blockchain gaming forgotten, but not yet gone | This Week in Business

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This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check back every Friday for a new entry.

Remember blockchain gaming? It's been almost exactly a year since we last focused on it in this space.

I hope you enjoyed that time off, because it's time to talk about it again as Zynga finally gave us the first peek at what its blockchain division has been doing for the past two years.

QUOTE | "Zynga has always been on the forefront of innovation, and with Sugartown, our ambition is to empower players through a sustainable Web3 platform full of fun and enduring games." – Zynga VP of Web3 Matt Wolf touts the company's first blockchain in an announcement this week.

First of all, the innovation Zynga was on the forefront of in its early years was commonly known as "stealing stuff."

QUOTE | "I don't fucking want innovation. You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers." – Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus speaking with staff, according to a source for a 2010 SF Weekly article that described Zynga as "one of the most evil places I've run into."

Second, it took two years to come up with a game where players need to own a cryptocurrency token to play, and mechanics revolving around those tokens will provide in-game currency that VentureBeat says is "used to unlock exciting rewards."

Personally, I don't think spending real money to buy fake money for a game that gives you even faker money to spend in the game qualifies as "exciting," but to each their own, I guess.

As for the game itself, the teaser trailer for