Valve Economist Yanis Varoufakis Slams NFTs And Play-To-Earn Video Games

thegamer.com:

Yanis Varoufakis recently weighed in on the various debates about the metaverse, NFTs, and play-to-earn games. Varoufakis was an economist at Valve before becoming a member of parliament and eventually the Minister of Finance in his home country of Greece. He holds a doctorate in economics from the University of Essex. Varoufakis taught economy at the Universities of Sydney and Athens.

Varoufakis refers to himself as an "erratic, inconsistent Marxist.” He sat down with the Crypto Syllabus to discuss his views during an interview. This organization describes itself as a “network hub, a distributed think tank, that would enable, deepen, and improve the work of journalists, academics, and intellectuals who are still committed to piercing through the hype and analyzing the crypto world critically.”

The economist really didn’t mince words 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,” Varoufakis noted. “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?"

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While he laid into play-to-earn games, Varoufakis pointed out that some positive things could potentially come of them. "When I worked with Valve, ten years ago,