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I hadn't seen Axie before, but I have seen a few other blockchain games. They seem to suffer the same pitfalls as the whole gamification trend that went around

I hadn't seen Axie before, but I have seen a few other blockchain games. They seem to suffer the same pitfalls as the whole gamification trend that went around a few years ago, in that the game part feels tacked on, which of course completely misses the point. I have no doubt a good game could be built around the blockchain, as are my thoughts on gamification for fitness or whatever else, but the game has to come first.

agentultra 4y ago
I don't share your optimism. Just as most smart contract/web3/crypto developers fail to understand political science, economics, physics, and software engineering; fewer seem to understand game development -- yet are happy to blithely repeat the same myth that game assets will somehow live on the block chain and be use-able in different games! Imagine owning Mario! There are a ton of great games being made today without any of this "ownership" stuff and users are not complaining about it. It's not a pain point for anyone who plays games. However it does present an opportunity for someone, somewhere to keep growing the herd of people at the bottom of the pyramid...
- bodge5000 4y ago
  > There are a ton of great games being made today without any of this "ownership" stuff... I didn't say anything about ownership, I said the blockchain. Surely you're not saying its impossible to make a good game that makes use of the blockchain? Maybe that will never happen, but it seems odd to discount it entirely. I get HN's negativity when it comes to the blockchain and crypto and all of that, I share it a lot of the time, but it feels like people here are just a little too jumpy when it comes to its very mention.
  - agentultra 4y ago
    If by blockchain you mean a hashed linked list or a Merkle Tree; that’s like saying someone could make a great game using a Red-Black Tree or a priority queue. While technically true it’s not what most people mean when they say that we could build good games on the blockchain. In this context they generally mean using some form of cryptocurrency and smart contract. I’d say sure, you could potentially figure out a way to make the most amazing AAA game experience to make your mother cry with pride. But if it’s on a smart contract blockchain you already have a problem: nobody is going to play it. If Axie was on the normal web, no blockchain at all, it would be a lot more popular. People still play Neopets-clones and Pokémon rip-offs online all the time. What’s holding Axie back, besides being an unimaginative and boring design, is the exorbitant costs of playing. Imagine teaching your non-technical friend how to set up a wallet, store it on a hardware fob, all the opsec necessary to prevent them from losing all of their tokens and coins… and then they have to spend hundreds of dollars to buy their game assets, gas fees for all of the transactions, etc. Terrible UX. And the more people that play it the slower it gets. Potentially crashing indefinitely under the weight of trying to keep up with the typical load a popular AAA would draw on an actually popular platform like Steam. But we probably won’t have to worry about that because the pool of crypto users is nothing compared to the size of the Steam/Switch/XBox/PlayStation audience. A killer app seems highly unlikely.
    - bodge5000 4y ago
      It doesn't need to be a massive, world changing, triple A game to be good. Maybe it'd be very small and niche, but there are plenty of great games like that. All I'm saying is, I think theres the possibility that the blockchain could be used in interesting ways within game dev. Maybe it'd take the form of cryptocurrency or smart contracts, thats not what I was thinking of but again, used in new and clever ways Im sure theres gold in there. Perhaps it'd be entirely on the backend, the player wouldnt even know its on the blockchain. I'm not sure, but as with any new technology its interesting to think about at least. Either way, it comes back to what I was saying before, the game has to come first. No game will be made good by sticking it on the blockchain, and as with the issues you mention it has to be properly factored into its design. I do get where your coming from though, the blockchain and crypto and all those do have certain associates with them
      - agentultra 4y ago
        Arguably Axie is pretty niche. And so are the other blockchain games out there. The thing they have in common is that they're all equally terrible. It's not because everyone tried to make a terrible game but because the blockchain is terribly limiting and the audience of people its for are not even interested in games to begin with. Part of the reason they're all kind-of samey is that you can only put so much metadata into the hash of a receipt on the chain. In Axie and similar games and NFTs this metadata is used to encode things about the game object and is supposed to make them unique, etc. You end up with character designs that look like poorly implemented procedural oat-meal: one character is not that much different from the theoretically-infinite others. So it's a pretty limited canvas to play with. The other reason is that the people who care about these features that blockchain-games enable don't play games. These features are designed for people who like to gamble: expensive digital assets that they expect will accrue in value. So they play the game by hiring people for peanuts to play the game for them, generating more game characters, in the hope that some of them will be "rare" and worth something that they can sell. This gets back to my original point: no gamers are complaining about a lack of a marketplace where they can buy and sell game assets. There's no pain point there for a gamer. They expect: give money, get game, play game. They get that and they're happy. When there's no pain point, there's no business. So maybe someone will use a hashed linked list in their game engine for some purpose or another, who knows. But I don't see any gamedevs chomping at the bit to make blockchain games. The few that are, like potentially Square-Enix, are probably only in the space because some execs are holding crypto and need a way to get more people buying into crypto. But most gamers? They've rejected micro-transactions already. Games that still have an audience that have micro-transactions relegate them to a side-store where they only sell cosmetic in-game items. Most people can tolerate that. Gatcha games and loot box games are still pretty controversial. And plenty of gamers are hugely put off by any sort of pay-to-win. I have no doubt some studios will try stuff on the blockchain but I'm certain that once their real-world dollars disappear into a black hole those execs will get replaced and the studios that survive will move on.
exdsq 4y ago
FWIW I quite liked the trading card games on Blockchain because you could sell cards you didn't want, buy those you did, and packs became like 'real life' in that you could get a really cool legendary and make some money (just like Pokemon/YuGiOh, but that you lose in games like Hearthstone where you just convert them into some in game currency). I've commented on this before and people have said "Oh, why does everything require a financial incentive in Web3?" but let's be fair, it exists just the same in most IRL TCGs.
- epicide 4y ago
  What does being on a blockchain get you in a digital TCG that a centralized server can't?
  - exdsq 4y ago
    Not much, just rare to find them because most TCG games don’t want to manage a shop and txs etc which you get for free on say Ethereum.
    - epicide 4y ago
      You still have to integrate your application with the chain, which I'm not sure whether that amounts to more or less money/risk than just managing it yourself or some other centralized platform. From a user perspective, it's certainly anything but free.

agentultra 4y ago

I don't share your optimism. Just as most smart contract/web3/crypto developers fail to understand political science, economics, physics, and software engineering; fewer seem to understand game development -- yet are happy to blithely repeat the same myth that game assets will somehow live on the block chain and be use-able in different games! Imagine owning Mario! There are a ton of great games being made today without any of this "ownership" stuff and users are not complaining about it. It's not a pain point for anyone who plays games. However it does present an opportunity for someone, somewhere to keep growing the herd of people at the bottom of the pyramid...

bodge5000 4y ago
> There are a ton of great games being made today without any of this "ownership" stuff... I didn't say anything about ownership, I said the blockchain. Surely you're not saying its impossible to make a good game that makes use of the blockchain? Maybe that will never happen, but it seems odd to discount it entirely. I get HN's negativity when it comes to the blockchain and crypto and all of that, I share it a lot of the time, but it feels like people here are just a little too jumpy when it comes to its very mention.
- agentultra 4y ago
  If by blockchain you mean a hashed linked list or a Merkle Tree; that’s like saying someone could make a great game using a Red-Black Tree or a priority queue. While technically true it’s not what most people mean when they say that we could build good games on the blockchain. In this context they generally mean using some form of cryptocurrency and smart contract. I’d say sure, you could potentially figure out a way to make the most amazing AAA game experience to make your mother cry with pride. But if it’s on a smart contract blockchain you already have a problem: nobody is going to play it. If Axie was on the normal web, no blockchain at all, it would be a lot more popular. People still play Neopets-clones and Pokémon rip-offs online all the time. What’s holding Axie back, besides being an unimaginative and boring design, is the exorbitant costs of playing. Imagine teaching your non-technical friend how to set up a wallet, store it on a hardware fob, all the opsec necessary to prevent them from losing all of their tokens and coins… and then they have to spend hundreds of dollars to buy their game assets, gas fees for all of the transactions, etc. Terrible UX. And the more people that play it the slower it gets. Potentially crashing indefinitely under the weight of trying to keep up with the typical load a popular AAA would draw on an actually popular platform like Steam. But we probably won’t have to worry about that because the pool of crypto users is nothing compared to the size of the Steam/Switch/XBox/PlayStation audience. A killer app seems highly unlikely.
  - bodge5000 4y ago
    It doesn't need to be a massive, world changing, triple A game to be good. Maybe it'd be very small and niche, but there are plenty of great games like that. All I'm saying is, I think theres the possibility that the blockchain could be used in interesting ways within game dev. Maybe it'd take the form of cryptocurrency or smart contracts, thats not what I was thinking of but again, used in new and clever ways Im sure theres gold in there. Perhaps it'd be entirely on the backend, the player wouldnt even know its on the blockchain. I'm not sure, but as with any new technology its interesting to think about at least. Either way, it comes back to what I was saying before, the game has to come first. No game will be made good by sticking it on the blockchain, and as with the issues you mention it has to be properly factored into its design. I do get where your coming from though, the blockchain and crypto and all those do have certain associates with them
    - agentultra 4y ago
      Arguably Axie is pretty niche. And so are the other blockchain games out there. The thing they have in common is that they're all equally terrible. It's not because everyone tried to make a terrible game but because the blockchain is terribly limiting and the audience of people its for are not even interested in games to begin with. Part of the reason they're all kind-of samey is that you can only put so much metadata into the hash of a receipt on the chain. In Axie and similar games and NFTs this metadata is used to encode things about the game object and is supposed to make them unique, etc. You end up with character designs that look like poorly implemented procedural oat-meal: one character is not that much different from the theoretically-infinite others. So it's a pretty limited canvas to play with. The other reason is that the people who care about these features that blockchain-games enable don't play games. These features are designed for people who like to gamble: expensive digital assets that they expect will accrue in value. So they play the game by hiring people for peanuts to play the game for them, generating more game characters, in the hope that some of them will be "rare" and worth something that they can sell. This gets back to my original point: no gamers are complaining about a lack of a marketplace where they can buy and sell game assets. There's no pain point there for a gamer. They expect: give money, get game, play game. They get that and they're happy. When there's no pain point, there's no business. So maybe someone will use a hashed linked list in their game engine for some purpose or another, who knows. But I don't see any gamedevs chomping at the bit to make blockchain games. The few that are, like potentially Square-Enix, are probably only in the space because some execs are holding crypto and need a way to get more people buying into crypto. But most gamers? They've rejected micro-transactions already. Games that still have an audience that have micro-transactions relegate them to a side-store where they only sell cosmetic in-game items. Most people can tolerate that. Gatcha games and loot box games are still pretty controversial. And plenty of gamers are hugely put off by any sort of pay-to-win. I have no doubt some studios will try stuff on the blockchain but I'm certain that once their real-world dollars disappear into a black hole those execs will get replaced and the studios that survive will move on.

exdsq 4y ago

FWIW I quite liked the trading card games on Blockchain because you could sell cards you didn't want, buy those you did, and packs became like 'real life' in that you could get a really cool legendary and make some money (just like Pokemon/YuGiOh, but that you lose in games like Hearthstone where you just convert them into some in game currency). I've commented on this before and people have said "Oh, why does everything require a financial incentive in Web3?" but let's be fair, it exists just the same in most IRL TCGs.

epicide 4y ago
What does being on a blockchain get you in a digital TCG that a centralized server can't?
- exdsq 4y ago
  Not much, just rare to find them because most TCG games don’t want to manage a shop and txs etc which you get for free on say Ethereum.
  - epicide 4y ago
    You still have to integrate your application with the chain, which I'm not sure whether that amounts to more or less money/risk than just managing it yourself or some other centralized platform. From a user perspective, it's certainly anything but free.