Playtron announces their g̶r̶i̶f̶t̶ "stablecoin"

So this was... ahem...

*check notes*

completely expected.

If you haven't heard of Playtron, they're the company making that other corporate-funded Linux gaming distro. They've built GameOS (formerly called PlaytronOS) and it's billed as:

A simple OS that does nothing but Gaming.

Playtron GameOS™ extracts the gaming ecosystem from Windows and leaves everything else behind

I fail to see how a cryptocurrency is "nothing but gaming," but I digress...

Look, Playtron had tried to garner good will with the Linux community by partnering with well-known and respected projects. Projects like winesapOS, ChimeraOS, Open Gamepad UI, Lutris, Heroic Games Launcher, Box64. They're all (somehow) associated with Playtron. And while I was skeptical, the fact that all these projects had signed on made me cautiously hopeful.

After all, I love both Linux and gaming. I have a YouTube channel with nearly 130,000 subscribers that's dedicated to those very ideas. So of course this would pique my interests. Look, I even tried it out on real hardware:

But my spidey sense was still tingling. The involvement of several investment/venture capital firms all-but confirmed that this was never going to be an organic success based around a FOSS community. And there was still that SuiPlay thing...

See, Playtron has been mired from the start in hardcore Web3 Grift energy. This was because of the SuiPlay0x1 handheld which was announced at the same time as their OS. Their initial press release was all about the potential of NFTs and other such nonsense in gaming. (Hint: there is no potential.)

So given that the debut of PlaytronOS (now called GameOS) was inexorably linked to all that Web3 bologna, it was only a matter of time before Playtron (the company) foisted their own griftocoin on the masses.

Enter: Game Dollar. That's the angle. That's the rub. It's a so-called "stablecoin" backed by the good faith and credit of the M0 stablecoin platform and Samsung's Venture Capital firm.

Game Dollar (not to be confused with Microsoft Points) is purportedly going to become "the backbone" of the video game industry. They actually believe that.

Their press release states:

“Playtron's GameOS reimagines how we play the games we love. Through this lens it became clear: stablecoins will become a financial backbone for the $500B global gaming economy. That’s why Playtron is excited to announce Game Dollar, the stablecoin built for games and ready to handle massive transaction volume over the next decade,” said Kirt McMaster, co-founder and CEO of Playtron. “Game Dollar will unlock new economic models for developers and marketplaces while enabling consumer incentives only possible via programmable dollars.

“Programmable stablecoins are the next evolution of digital assets, and Game Dollar is a powerful example of how this innovation unlocks utility for one of the world’s most dynamic sectors,” said Adeniyi Abiodun, Co-Founder and CPO of Mysten Labs. “We’re witnessing the start of a new era where gamers not only play, but participate in dynamic, self-sustaining economies.

“We’re excited to see Playtron harness M0’s universal stablecoin platform to reimagine the gaming payments experience in a unique way,” said Luca Prosperi, co-founder and CEO at M0. “This collaboration highlights the power of programmable money applied to real-world use cases, and our vision is that this is how the payments and rewards experiences of the future will look like.

“Gaming is a global community, and financial access shouldn't be a barrier. With Bridge powering seamless entry and exit points for Game Dollar, we're making digital economies more inclusive for players—and radically simpler for developers,” said Zach Abrams, CEO at Bridge. “They get stable, ready-to-use payments infrastructure that takes care of compliance and enables a global reach out of the box.”

Here's my advice to these guys:

On a serious note, the fact that there's now a fully integrated cryptocurrency in this OS? It has killed any twilight of curiosity I might have had for Playtron. (It wasn't much, honestly.)

It takes balls to start laying the rug for the rug pull this early. But I believe a rug pull is inevitable given that I think all crytocurrencies are scams.

Allow me to suggest foregoing the grift and selecting Bazzite, instead.