Today’s pin to the brow is that you can now buy NFTs based on Dead By Daylight’s in-game models of Hellraiser’s Pinhead. I can tell the difference between pleasure and pain, and this is pain. The Dead By Daylight Twitter account announced the news yesterday: You know something has gone over well with a community when an announcement tweets gets 486 retweets but 7207 quote tweets. To quote one example tweet, former Dead By Daylight gameplay programmer wrote that he is “strongly opposed to the spread of NFTs and extremely disappointed to see the game that I love associated with them.” This convoluted path does mean that it’s difficult to decide how to portion out blame. On October 14th, Dead By Daylight’s devs did tweet to say that when they work with licensing partners, they provide them with in-game models as well as Chapter keys. “They are free to use these however they see fit as the rightful owners of these characters.” That might mean Behaviour had very little real involvement or choice in the production of this NFT, and it’s quite a different tone than the tweet four days later, which refers to Boss Protocol as “great partners”. Much has already been written about how NFTs are dumb, bad for the environment, and often linked to scams. Not enough has been written about how tacky they are. I already associate Hellraiser with absurdly priced figurines found either in mail-order adverts from old issues of SFX magazine, or inside fluorescent-lit display cases in unclean Forbidden Planets. NFTs are the digital equivalent. Not an ideal set of connotations on the verge of a reboot movie.
