8 ms·

I actually think in-game content is one of the most legitimate uses for NFTs. It's also cool that since the on-chain data doesn't go away if the game does, it a

• NikolaNovak 5y ago
  Pardon my ignorance - but if the game goes away, what precisely does the NFT token which remain grants you? Isn't it just a confirmation that you own an item in a game that you cannot access/use anymore? I guess as always, I am looking for benefit of NFT/chain solution over simpler non-NFT/chain solution. I hear persistency, but in this case I don't see it in practical terms.
  • pcstl 5y ago
    It can be used by a different game. The token is just a token, what it means depends on how it's used. A smart game producer that sees a NFT-based game go down could say "hey, you know all those items you had on <game X>? Come over to my game and you'll get <benefit> based on that stuff!" Since ownership of the token is publicly visible and not locked into Game X's database. It could also be used by anything else, really. Lots of ideas where cross-game promotion could be done using NFTs to validate ownership of something in Game A within Game B without requiring the game developers to set up a specific intergame data link.
    • afavour 5y ago
      I love that idea but the cynical side of me says a game dev wants someone buying new stuff on their platform, not importing already bought stuff.
      • carlosdp 5y ago
        If you let people import their stuff, it's an excellent way to bootstrap a player base, which is the hardest part of game development by far.
        • louloulou 5y ago
          Exactly, and they're not mutually exclusive. You can still let players buy new stuff on your platform as well as import other value/items.
          • antifa 5y ago
            Why would a dev write a game that detects another game's micro transactions and then give the player the fruit of the dev's labor while ignoring that the other game's devs got the profits of the micro transactions? This is not a solid business plan.
        • meheleventyone 5y ago
          But having a business model predicated on user acquisition by timing for a competitor game going out of business doesn’t seem a sensible bootstrapping plan.
          • IanCal 5y ago
            You don't need them to go out of business, people enjoy multiple games.
            • meheleventyone 5y ago
              In this space people tend to have a main game and customer retention is a significant part of revenue. So making your game compatible with a competitor such that they could easily walk away would work against your best interests. Otherwise these co-marketing activities would already exist since there is no inherent need for a blockchain to implement them. A soft example of this is games that include characters from other games. A lot of these suggestions fall foul of the same problem that they offer a great deal for the customer but not for the game maker. Which whilst altruistic is rather naive to commercial reality. A value add model like the Amiibo would work better but again is predicated on developers actually capturing some revenue from supporting it.
              • 5y ago
    • andybak 5y ago
      Don't NFTs usually hardcode a URL? Anyone wanting to "adopt" would want to have control of the relevent domains. Otherwise what's to stop multiple games trying to adopt the same group of NFTs?
      • IanCal 5y ago
        NFTs have an ID that uniquely identifies them, the URL is just for extra data really. > Otherwise what's to stop multiple games trying to adopt the same group of NFTs? Nothing at all. Breaking data out of small silos into one large database opens up possibilities like this.
        • munk-a 5y ago
          So as a user I could either purchase one of these NFTs and give you money - or just generate my own NFT and use it to get your stuff for free?
          • IanCal 5y ago
            No, the NFTs are uniquely identifiable.
            • munk-a 5y ago
              So if the original issuer of an NFT goes out of business I, as another studio, can't continue to print tokens for the same asset? (I mean I guess I could print a duplicate line - but I couldn't carry on the same line).
              • andybak 5y ago
                The NFT is unique - not the thing it points to. Anyone can mint an NFT to point to anything. There's no guarantee beyond what's traceable on the blockchain. Once the NFT "points" to something outside of the blockchain, then all bets are off.
        • pwinnski 5y ago
    • orblivion 5y ago
      This is the first interesting use case for NFTs that I've heard of.
    • IanCal 5y ago
      One example may be unlocking something if you've 100%-ed one or a set of games.
      • munk-a 5y ago
        So you want your game to appeal to users who buy and thoroughly play lots of games (and likely would snap up yours anyways if it was in the same genre) while also discouraging users who are new to the market?
        • IanCal 5y ago
          If requiring you to do stuff for some reward instead of just giving it to you is "discouraging users" in your mind, I think you've missed the point of many games. Maybe they're all games you made, maybe they're all games built in a community, maybe it's a fan made extension of another game. Those all have reasons you may want to add access to something based on data from another game. Perhaps it's a core mechanic, where puzzles are only solvable by completing tasks in other games. Perhaps it's just letting you play as Guybrush Threepwood if you've played the first Monkey Island. It doesn't have to be all within games. Gated access to communities perhaps (a speedrunning discord if you've got a certain achievement). The ingenuity of game devs never ceases to surprise me, and sharing data between programs is fundamental to lots of interesting systems so the idea that sharable data between games provides no utility is odd to me.
          • munk-a 5y ago
            I don't dislike this sort of unlock system - I think Assassin's Creed Odyssey made a thing of it by letting, for instance, you crew your galley with Enzio wannabes if you'd played through AC2. However, the utility is pretty low and I'd imagine you end up sinking more dev time into the endevour than you're going to reap. I've worked in the gaming industry. Margins are incredibly tight and the timetables are usually extremely brutal. It'll take time to support different character models and swappable cosmetics have, on multiple occasions, resulted in game exploits. One of the early notable ones was Oddjob in Goldeneye[1] but you also often see clipping bugs where tall characters might clip through no pass boundaries and either insta-kill themselves or find a way to get out of bounds. These things have costs. 1. https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-08-23-21-years-after-goldeneye-n64-came-out-its-finally-official-playing-as-oddjob-was-cheating https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-08-23-21-years-after...
    • serverholic 5y ago
      I'd also like to add that games are only one use-case for NFTs. Recently I saw someone offering NFTs for donating to charity. Incentivizing charity donations is a really cool and creative use-case IMO.
      • lottin 5y ago
        This is like saying someone offered a human sacrifice for donating to charity, therefore incentivising charity donations is one use-case of human sacrifices that is really cool. What?
        • serverholic 5y ago
          You can't be serious. They were offered a simple collectable token. Why is that bad? People get stickers for voting.
          • munk-a 5y ago
            I feel like that charity incentive still isn't nearly as strong as either 1) the clout, 2) the tax break or 3) just feeling good about themselves.
            • serverholic 5y ago
              One thing that NFTs have taught me is that people love collectables. If that encourages more people to give then what's the problem?
              • munk-a 5y ago
                Oh there's nothing wrong with it - and it might be (much like collectible pins[1]) that this is a thing that can help boost engagement in a profitable manner. But it's just "Gotta Catch'em All"-ism and I wouldn't say it's utterly without value - but there isn't a lot of value there. 1. https://store.penny-arcade.com/collections/pins https://store.penny-arcade.com/collections/pins
          • 5y ago
    • munk-a 5y ago
      Why would another game ever honor those tokens outside of cosmetic fluff junk? It's like, as an IHoP, agreeing to honor every coupon Denny's issues - like sure, you can grab a bit of extra business that way, but Denny's could also screw you by flooding the market with coupons where they aren't competing. Also, bear in mind that you still need to cook all those meals (or, rather, do all the art for those cosmetics). And if you're making art you probably want your normal players to be able to give you money for it as well... and you might not want to give it away for free to players just because they supported this other company that's not you.
    • Goronmon 5y ago
      A smart game producer that sees a NFT-based game go down could say "hey, you know all those items you had on <game X>? Come over to my game and you'll get <benefit> based on that stuff!" Since ownership of the token is publicly visible and not locked into Game X's database. Why is this better than just "Come over to my game and get all the benefits that everyone gets, even if you didn't play <Game X>!"
    • spywaregorilla 5y ago
      This is a terrible idea > A smart game producer that sees a NFT-based game go down could say "hey, you know all those items you had on <game X>? Come over to my game and you'll get <benefit> based on that stuff!" Since ownership of the token is publicly visible and not locked into Game X's database. So... Game X has enabled competitors to steal their customers by not using their own database. What exactly is the benefit here? If it's the same company they can just use their own database. What if Game X and Game Y decide they don't get along and start to flood the network with items that are worthless in Game X and EXTREMELY VALUABLE in Game Y? There are so many reasons you don't want to cede control of your game world to a competitor company! > Lots of ideas where cross-game promotion could be done using NFTs to validate ownership of something in Game A within Game B without requiring the game developers to set up a specific intergame data link. Oh good, all we need is for all games to define their item data on a universal scheme that fits the needs of every single game.
      • pwinnski 5y ago
        Yeah, as someone who has worked on mobile games, this entire scenario suggests ignorance of how game development works.
  • kfarr 5y ago
    I think the best case scenario it would be useful if game host goes out of business, primary game server closes but users still have assets which persist on the chain. It'd then be possible for the community to resurrect the game and use on chain data to restore functionality
    • notcoolbezos 5y ago
      reminds me of sword art online! This same concept is used in the anime, ids of the items from the base game were transferred over to the new game. Interesting to see something like this happen in a few years.
    • antifa 5y ago
      I think a better scenario would be if games I paid for worked offline after the developers leave, and there were no micro transactions.
  • whiskyant 5y ago
    The NFT pretty much acts as an entry in a shared public database. This means if it’s a popular NFT, multiple games can support the asset by building support for it in game.
    • munk-a 5y ago
      You know what else is a shared database? Shared databases. In the mobile market games already have a long history of key-ringing on common advertiser IDs to strengthen their Ad revenue (i.e. all Square Enix produced games might use a shared advertiser ID on OSes that support that (like iOS)). Additionally some games already have carryover content - it's rather rare but a good example is Total War: Warhammer - where DLCs from the first game also applied to the second game (i.e. allowing you to play the Wood Elves in Mortal Empires). The reasons these things are rare is that, except for some limited circumstances (like in TW: WH it was the same dev and publisher) you're usually cannibalizing your own sales to boost some other game's revenue which is just weird.
• WalterSear 5y ago
  Steam achievements could do that faster and better. But people don't want Steam achievements: they are chasing the excitement, that's chasing the money, that's made by wash trading gifs.
• sumeno 5y ago
  Who looks at video games today and thinks “what I want is to spend increasingly absurd amounts of money for in-game items”? That kind of microtransaction garbage is already ruining many games without the need for this NFT nonsense on top of it. The only people who want more of that are the people who think it’ll make them rich.
  • xtracto 5y ago
    > Who looks at video games today and thinks “what I want is to spend increasingly absurd amounts of money for in-game items”? I think it is a generational gap thing. I myself (40 year old) play CS:GO quite a lot (I'm really bad at it as well haha), but don't care about all the stickers and other custom stuff that people buy there. However, there's a huge market for those stickers. And there is people that really like spending money to "own" that stuff. I feel that my generation (X/xenials and older) don't have a strong sense of "digital property" (in the end, we grew at the time of napster, kazaa, edonkey, and downloading copies of anything digital. At the same time "games" were owned physically through NES, SNES, Gameboy, Genesis cartridges ) But for Millenails/Z, digital property comes more naturally and they "feel" the "ownage" of digital property.
    • Jensson 5y ago
      Ah, this explains everything. Not-young people who don't understand microtransactions thinks that young people really loves NFT's, and therefore spends a ton of money on NFT's hoping they will be valuable. But young people don't care about them at all. This is Beanie Babies all over again.