4 ms·

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

• 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.
          • antifa 5y ago
            > A lot of these suggestions fall foul of the same problem that they offer a great deal for the customer If you ignore that NFTs are basically a glorfied registry for micro transactions. This is like buying a $200 refill cup from a movie theater then being allowed to use it at a competing movie theater chain, except the cup isn't real. It was never a good deal, and there's no incentive for theater's to join in.
            • meheleventyone 5y ago
              Yes my point is that the ideas aren’t viable even if they weren’t suggesting NFTs and that business models exist for similar things that work but wouldn’t for NFTs.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • munk-a 5y ago
      How is this a more effective way to bootstrap a player base than, say, handing out drops on twitch or having seasonal item packs up for free for a limited time on the store (i.e. "Until Nov 1 you can get the Halloween cosmetic pack for free on steam if you own our game"). In all the cases I can think of tying your promotion to an NFT that needed to be earned in a different game is purely going to lower the number of people that this promotion will apply to while not at all lowering the cost in terms of dev time & art (because while an NFT might indicate a Santa Hat you actually need to build that item as an art asset in your game and make sure it's compatible with models and clipping and all that junk). I feel like most of the NFT arguments I've read in this thread are assuming that somehow using an NFT gets you out of the cost of actually spending the art & dev time on producing the cosmetic - just because it exists in another game doesn't make it appreciably any cheaper to add to your game. I will admit there are ways to make art more "valuable" by actually limiting the number of available copies - but that trendiness is hard to effectively harness. Beanie Babies took off in the 90s and everyone's brother started buying up newly released ones... almost all of which were worthless because they scaled up their production to meet demand - and if they hadn't they wouldn't have been easy to get a hold of.
    • dragonwriter 5y ago
      > If you let people import their stuff, it's an excellent way to bootstrap a player base So, its good for a competitor to the original game developer. What motivates the original developer? If they want to bootstrap a new game feom an old game user base and purchases DB, they can do it without a public database of assets while excluding competitors from the same opportunity.
• 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.