NFT
Matt Sanders (aka M. Shadows) is the lead singer of the heavy metal band Avenged Sevenfold. But he’s much more than just a famous metalhead: he’s also a gamer, a CryptoPunk, and one of the brains behind the band’s 2014 dungeon crawler PC roleplaying game called Hail to the King: Deathbat.
In the latest episode of DecryptOn the gm’s GM podcast, Sanders shared his views on video games that use crypto and NFTs – and took a strong stance against so-called “experts” who oppose Web3 technology.
“I’m a gamer, so I understand digital goods,” he said of his early affinity for purely virtual assets. “I understand there is a scarcity of it.”
Why Heavy Metal Band Avenged Sevenfold Keeps Betting On NFTs
Sanders was relatively early with crypto, saying he bought Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin around 2016. But he was also early with NFTs and became enamored with the early CryptoPunks community.
“This was a very sophisticated, progressive group of people,” he said of the CryptoPunks Discord server. “Honestly, I learned a lot from them. And many of them I have become friends with in real life.”
Sanders has dabbled in crypto and gaming and sees the two as a natural fit. Like many NFT proponents, he’s not content paying big bucks for digital assets in the closed, “walled garden” ecosystems of traditional online video games.
“It’s insane that we pay the money we pay for the skins,” he said of cosmetic items in non-crypto games like battle royale shooter Fortnite.
In Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), cosmetic weapon skins can be sold for hundreds of dollars to six-figure amounts on the secondary market, but they only work in CS:GO. And in many games, like Fortnite, those purchased items can only be resold in so-called “gray markets” which may violate the game publisher’s terms of service.
Like many gamers who are open to the possibilities of NFTs and crypto in video games, Sanders believes making such high-value items easily marketable and transferable takes gaming stakes to the next level. He raised the possibility that some could exploit such economies, but predicts that technical solutions will be developed.
“It could be scary-cool,” he said of a possible high-stakes blockchain game, “or it could just be what our kids are doing.”
He echoed a sentiment shared by top players in the crypto gaming industry such as Gala Games, Solana, and Magic Eden: the next generation of tokenized games should be genuinely fun, and no amount of crypto rewards or incentives can make a bad game good .
“You have to have a great game first. It can’t be, ‘Oh, we’re an NFT game, and here’s our game,'” Sanders said. “It has to be, ‘This is a great game and everyone wants to play .'”
DJs Polo & Pan put a fresh spin on chess piece NFTs in Immortal Game
He is also not the biggest fan of crypto jargon such as “Web3 gaming” and argued that such terms can create confusion and branding issues. Instead, the singer wants to see content and usability come to the forefront. Still, he didn’t mince words when asked about the wider backlash against NFTs in gaming.
“There is just pushback everywhere,” he said, adding that the mainstream media has harpooned all crypto with “experts” who don’t really understand the technology.
“People tell stories, story-based things, right? They need a story, they need a story, they rally behind things and they are very tribal,” Sanders argued. “What’s happening now is that everything conflicts with this story of ‘This can help you.’ And so it’s gotten so strong that there just has to be some really nice use cases.
