Konami, the video games company hell bent on making all the wrong moves, is at it again. As a celebration, or so it claims, of Castlevania and its 35th anniversay, the company has launched the Konami Memorial NFT collection. And within it are 14 tokens from the video game series.
At the very least, Konami says that its Castlevania NFTs are not just old pictures from the game. There are some new ones, as well as select background music (BGM) and highlight reels from the series. These will go up for auction on 13 January 2022 via OpenSea.
The publisher has also provided the press a sample of what some of them look like, with watermarks so that you’re not saving the real deal with a right click or long press. Or, you can do exactly that for the images by visiting their respective pages on OpenSea.
Source: Konami.This move is, to put it mildly, very reminiscent of the days when Konami made its insane pachinko push following its fallout with Hideo Kojima. Castlevania itself, as well as the publisher’s other super successful franchises like Silent Hill and Metal Gear Solid, were turned into skins of other quick money makers rather than getting their own games. The most recent of them being Fatal Frame, getting its own pachinko machine just last year.
Making this worse is the fact that this announcement comes after the massive backlash to Square Enix’s own attempt at chasing the NFT trend. Which itself follows the massive backlash to Ubisoft Quartz and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2‘s attempt at shoehorning NFTs into the game.
If you would like to take a look at what’s on auction, or maybe even take part, you can visit the dedicated web page for the Castlevania 35th anniversary auction linked below. By the way, at the very end of the page is the NFT auction’s terms of use. And at the very end of that is this line that reads “Konami does not guarantee that the value of the NFT will increase after the purchase”.
(Source: Konami)
