15 ms·

Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit

63 points by unripe_syntax 4y ago

smt88 4y ago
> “I think the idea of creating digital assets, and then taxing everyone for all the transactions around them is a good model,” Kan said. I don't think he has the slightest idea what players want, because this isn't it. This is exactly what players are raging against: games optimized for the creators' greed, not for the players' enjoyment. It doesn't sound like more fun than an existing game by that description, and we know from Axie's collapse that no one plays these games for fun.
- kodah 4y ago
  I think the problem is that in the short term gamers signal their approval by buying skins, which is what he goes on to talk about later in the article. A metaverse where these skins are transportable game to game. He's trying to analog these outfits to outfits you would buy at a store. Once gamers see how much they've dumped into things that will never produce anything of value, they're a bit ticked. Gamers who know other gamers who have done it I suspect are also ticked if they don't feel the short term peer pressure. At some point the distribution will lean, but I think we're a ways away from that.
  - eli 4y ago
    > A metaverse where these skins are transportable game to game. I question how desirable that even is. So like some rich kid buys a golden suit and can wear it in a bunch of games...I mean, sure, ok? Not really groundbreaking stuff. Would you buy a game because it lets you do that? Assuming the total cost is the same, I'd just as soon buy different skins in each of my games...assuming I care about skins at all. And that's setting aside the really significant implementation challenges.
    - ohCh6zos 4y ago
      I think any developer that implements this would be in between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand it becomes impossible to have a consistent aesthetic or theme if you liberally allow people to bring their own assets, and on the other if you allow it but somehow map resources into your aesthetic the owners will almost certainly feel ripped off. As a player I think I would find it less than desirable to be playing Darkest Dungeon and view Halo content next to cartoon Fallguys. The NFT owner probably wants more than their NFT transformed into bytes and used as a random seed to determine the grain on their wooden shield. They almost certainly want a direct map to their resource.
    - clarle 4y ago
      Maybe I'm out of touch these days but I don't see how Web3 in this scenario is also better than just a standardized API schema that's shared across different games or platforms. The developer still needs to implement how this skin or texture is applied in their specific game, so there's still net additional work per skin or texture. You don't just get it for free as soon as someone else implements it in one game.
      - rcacho 4y ago
        The Web3 part of this would be that no company needs to be responsible for the database that says that a player is in possession of a particular item. The fact that limited cooperation between companies is needed is what could allow the adoption of standardized schemas. I'd be curious if even that would be so simple. There could be competing blockchains or types of NFTs. You might also get into the situation where instead of every company building the software to verify ownership they just pay specialized companies.In that situation Web3 technology isn't really all that different than a company building a virtual shop API. A company like Valve could probably do this better than Opensea could and without all the extra Web3 technology.
    - SaltyBackendGuy 4y ago
      > I question how desirable that even is I am with you, but I am a bit more cynical after watching my 6-10 year old nephews get into gaming. All they care about are the skins, it's insane to me but they really like it. Knowing that makes me dislike this angle more because I feel like their entire market vertical will be 6-10 years olds with their parents money. Not to mention the whole, creating addicts out of kids in the name of digital consumerism.
  - cowtools 4y ago
    I suppose it makes sense if the NFT is used as a fundraising method for a Free/Open source game, but the mentality that games should respect each other's NFTs is a bit in-congruent with that. There's this idea of the "metaverse" which I think is informed entirely from fiction and hype. It's very detached from the actual incentives at play.
  - SkyMarshal 4y ago
    > A metaverse where these skins are transportable game to game. Is this even viable? Can a skin from say an Unreal engine game be copied over to and used in a Unity engine game?
    - runako 4y ago
      Disclaimer: I'm not a game dev. The technical problem is probably the smaller issue. The larger issue is that the publishers of the respective games have to allow this type of cross-usage, and they do not have an incentive to make their games interoperable with other games. Even in business software, where there are practical incentives to interop, compatibility at the level of asset sharing remains very rare.
    - Animats 4y ago
      > Can a skin from say an Unreal engine game be copied over to and used in a Unity engine game? With difficulty, yes. If you have the asset in the creator tools, rather than just inside the game as a game user, it's straightforward. There's some standardization in this area, and it's getting better. There are now open formats. Look up "GLTF" and "USD" formats. Until about two years ago, most content was interchanged in proprietary formats, but we're now past that. The Khronos Group, which standardized Vulkan, is behind this standardization effort. Currently, you can usually move rigid objects from one platform to another, but articulated skeletons and scripted objects need manual rework to port. "Ripping" models from games is a thing. There are tools. NFTs do not enable asset portability. They are part of a DRM system. The goal of the DRM is to prevent more asset portability than someone wants. This only works if the receiving system pays attention to the DRM. There's no technical obstacle right now to finding the JPEG for a Bored Ape Yacht Club and printing it as a poster for your wall. But you won't be able to mint it as a new NFT and sell it on OpenSea, because OpenSea checks.
      - josefx 4y ago
        > There are now open formats. Look up "GLTF" and "USD" formats. We had fbx for decades, only difference is that it wasn't open source. Even better USD is an art format, nearly every concept it supports is for art direction, comparison of various designs, hiding of details that may get in the way of some modellers work. It isn't dynamic, it doesn't even have the concept of level of detail, so it will render a 10 million poly model even if all you see is a three pixel wide spot on the screen.
- cinntaile 4y ago
  Plenty of players happily pay Steam 30% of the sale value of their ingame items.
  - smt88 4y ago
    Web3 and in-game items are completely unrelated. Crypto and Web3 add nothing to in-game items for either developers or players. Items are inherently centralized and cannot be decentralized because games can choose to stop supporting them.
    - powerhour 4y ago
      Games can stop supporting decentralized items, and if every game you care about does, the item may as well have been centralized to begin with. What's the difference? I'm not asking about the technology, I'm asking about the user experience.
      - toofy 4y ago
        > the item may as well have been centralized to begin with. that’s exactly the point. this adds nothing new or interesting for any party involved (except the scammer and their marketing people)
    - cinntaile 4y ago
      It's a digital asset, it's taxed by 30% each time it gets sold. Players happily pay the price. It's the perfect counterexample to your claim that players rage against taxing digital assets on each transaction. It's just not true. When you can't see something so blatantly obvious, it tells me you are very emotional about this and further discussion won't really lead anywhere. So I'm out.
      - smt88 4y ago
        > It's a digital asset, it's taxed by 30% each time it gets sold. Yes. So what? That's already possible without crypto. The game developer decides which player owns what items, and they can charge for item transfers if they want to. > Players happily pay the price. This has nothing to do with what I said, and I didn't dispute it. Digital assets are valuable (and have been for decades), and players certainly are happy to pay for them. > It's the perfect counterexample to your claim that players rage against taxing digital assets on each transaction. Counterexample != data. Most players don't want crypto in their games. A few players who tolerate it don't mean anything. But really, I've conflated two points I was making, which is my bad. Point 1: Crypto adds nothing to digital assets in gaming. They are inherently centralized and can't be decentralized. Point 2: Games like Axie Infinity, where the gameplay is terrible and serves only as a thin veneer over a speculative market, are not something gamers want. They only serve the creators. > When you can't see something so blatantly obvious If it's obvious, why can't you make an argument beyond, "People buy digital assets"? What value does crypto add? What are some games that people would not play if they weren't crypto-enabled? As a player, what benefit does crypto provide me? How does it make the game better or more fun?
- ohCh6zos 4y ago
  I'm not certain a game is better because it contains 'digital assets'? I know that psychologically I can't play games that have ads for buyable things or stores available in the program itself, so I don't have any belief I would be able to play these either.
- loceng 4y ago
  At its foundation it sounds like rent seeking.
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    Inducting artificial scarcity to seek rent seems like a parody of capitalism by some 20th century communist. And yet here we are
    - charcircuit 4y ago
      Video games would be no where as large today if they weren't allowed to introduce artificial scarcity. This is the entire point of copyright law too. Artificial scarcity allows people to monetize their creations.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  The current model of in-game purchases also seems completely broken to me tbh
- jspaetzel 4y ago
  Some people like this, those people are gamblers, not gamers.
game-of-throws 4y ago
I look forward to the future where North Korean hackers exploit a bug in a smart contract to steal everybody's Fortnite costumes
eli 4y ago
Without "luring players with profit" isn't it just a video game? What makes it web3? What features require a blockchain?
- s17n 4y ago
  this is addressed in the article: > he admitted that building this interoperable ecosystem, which he sees as the future of video games overall, doesn’t technically require blockchain technology at all. > > “Blockchain is just the way that it’s going to happen, I think, because there’s a lot of cultural momentum around people equating blockchain with openness and trusting things that are decentralized on the blockchain.” (actually I think he's understating the case here, representing ownership is a real use case for blockchains)
  - eli 4y ago
    But blockchain only has "cultural momentum" because of the lure of profits. Is there an example of a popular blockchain project that isn't based on "early buys can get rich by selling to latecomers"? I guess the argument boils down to "it's web3 because it has blockchain, and it has blockchain because that's a good marketing buzzword." Which, fair enough, I guess. That could be right. Blockchain-backed or not, I think it's pretty unlikely that a bunch of competing game companies are going to come up with a system that lets you share items between games. That sounds technically and politically very hard, and for not a lot of benefit.
  - Judgmentality 4y ago
    So basically blockchain is going to coincidentally solve a problem that it's not explicitly needed for? Honestly I can see this happening, but regardless of it being blockchain or a vanilla API it's worthless without everybody (game developers, game publishers, gamers, marketplace owners) agreeing to work on it together. The assets only have value if they're portable, and they're only portable if everybody agrees the assets are valuable enough to spend time/money/infrastructure supporting. It's a very weird chicken-and-egg problem and I think it's a long way from being solved. Part of the reason is because some of the necessary players see a financial incentive not to solve this problem.
dumpsterlid 4y ago
Question, how did mobile gaming, a medium of games that runs on devices almost everybody has on them at all times completely destroy consumer confidence in the medium and atrophy innovation and growth in said medium for years and years? The answer? It was full of people like Justin Kan that look into the future of gaming and had such miserable imaginations that all they could envision larger, more predatory monetization models instead of yah know... new games and new experiences. Maybe crypto bullshit is the future of video games, but that will only be because capitalism burned out and exploited every last passionate game developer who wanted to make a good game because they love games.
- cowtools 4y ago
  I think it comes down to the marketplace. The Apple/Google "app store" allows that model to work, and the consumers don't seem to mind. It is basically the flash games that were popular years ago, but now with immediate access to parents' credit cards.
carlosdp 4y ago
The whole "play-to-earn" concept isn't actually that popular in web3 builder circles, in my experience. The companies that work on that just spend a ton of money on marketing, and Axie's valuation went so high for a while, that it keeps getting mainstream attention. I think he's totally right, though I don't think he does a great job of explaining why blockchain tech can be beneficial for gamers. Here's some of my quick thoughts on potential benefits: - Credibly neutral in-game item marketplaces: I think this will take a long time to get any traction, to be honest, because while these marketplaces are super centralized around Steam (Valve) and Epic today, gamers don't currently face any major issues with those marketplaces. I think the way this tech takes off is when more marketplaces die because EA decides to start and then kill one, and everyone loses their items they paid money for, because they don't have any sovereignty over their purchase. There is already discomfort among gamers about the current world of DRM, where a game can become unusable because the company decides to shut down a server 5-10 years later. - Sustainable game server hosting: on that note, it's becoming less common that people are able to host their own servers for multiplayer online games. When you are able to, funding those servers has usually been either donation based, or in the modern day perhaps requiring a Patreon subscription. Tying in the easy value-moving crypto provides, it is possible to make games that make it really easy for players to "pay" for the servers they use, and smart contracts can be used to coordinate incentivizing and compensating people/services who run servers for those games, in transparent ways and perhaps using value capture that is built into the game (ie. if you buy a hat, maybe a % automatically goes to a fund that pays out to servers you play on). This could make it possible for game servers to essentially always exist as long as 1 player wants to play it, any time in the future. In other words, we can have the convenience of online games, but with the permanence and resilience of DOOM. - Interoperability of digital items: when people talk about this, they usually talk about being able to use a gun from one game and bring it into another game. I think that's suuuuupeerrr far off, if a good idea ever at all. The much more straightforward, and I think cool, idea around this is basically: if your special skins are NFTs, that makes them automatically compatible with any and all apps and protocols that support NFTs out of the box. So you can stake them in an online poker game that supports NFTs, sell them in any NFT marketplace/auction house, and sure, bring it to your metaverse house or whatever and keep it in your virtual house. Compute-level interoperability is the most powerful aspect of crypto/blockchain, imo. I also think Justin is wrong about not needing blockchain. I agree that in theory, some other solution could provide the right incentives and interfaces to support this ecosystem of composability and interoperability with native value transfer, but I think you'll just end up re-inventing something that looks kinda like blockchains we have today. This has also been proven time and time again by new alternative chains that strip off the parts they find "pointless" and expensive, and end up realizing why they need it later. Overall: Headline is correct, in my opinion, and I think a lot if not most of the web3 builder world is on the same page today. I wouldn't over-index on the other stuff he said, though.
xor99 4y ago
The metaverse and web3 will make life worse (e.g. gradual loss of body and neuroprivacy, home privacy, financial privacy etc) and have a ridiculously high energy cost
mark242 4y ago
You look at the biggest games of the year: God of War, Elden Ring, Stray, etc. Shoehorning in NFT-style assets into these games is just a ridiculous proposal, especially ones with any kind of "marketplace" that you would have to support. All of the time and effort and maintenance and customer service, all of that would hit the bottom line of the game. The better studios -- that is, the ones who make game-of-the-year candidates -- just won't bother when they can be spending their finite development time on the game itself. And the idea that they'd buy into a cross-game shared-asset economy is just ludicrous and is a fundamental misunderstanding of P&L at a studio level. There is absolutely zero chance of, say, EA and Activision collaborating on a spec to share assets across brands. Zero, no matter how much you could spin it to executives. "So a BF player could use COD skins?" would get you laughed out of your pitch.
- thr0wawayf00 4y ago
  > There is absolutely zero chance of, say, EA and Activision collaborating on a spec to share assets across brands. Zero, no matter how much you could spin it to executives. We're seeing the startup mentality being applied to generate these new markets within gaming and people just aren't buying it. It's such an intellectually dishonest argument to make that players want to be able to share assets across games as you point out, yet we're seeing these highly-respected tech leaders try to convince us that such a brain-dead idea is visionary. Why? Because they stand to make another fortune on it and they have absolutely no problem lying to our faces about it.
  - duskwuff 4y ago
    And the closely related concept of being able to transfer functional game items between games, or sell them on the open market, is even more ridiculous. Not only is it completely incompatible with any concept of game balance, but it's really just a roundabout way of saying that every game should be pay-to-win (by buying items outside the game) -- which is a mechanic which most gamers hate.
    - malermeister 4y ago
vegcel 4y ago
The concept of a web3 Roblox is probably the best conceptualization of a web3 gaming platform. -There's a virtual marketplace of skins/clothes that can be used from game to game motivated by a creator economy (basically NFTs) -Game devs can make money from in-game purchases A pro of this system would be more ownership of the IP holders, wherein they aren't getting extremely unfavorable rates like in the case of young devs for Roblox. Living outside of the central authority of Roblox Inc would be a positive and a negative.
- upupandup 4y ago
  and theres no need for cryptocurrencies that are unstable and volatile. simply allow purchase of tokens directly so that its guaranteed to be pegged at 1:1 without an intermediate wash trading crypto exchange. this whole web3/crypto craze is bizarre. just literally reinventing words for what we had since the beginning of the internet in hopes of raising funds by shoving buzzwords at VCs who are probably not going to make it by next year when interest rates shoot up
swalsh 4y ago
In theory, I actually like the idea of games connected to the blockchain. The issue is, now your little funtime activity has serious tax implications. Imagine this, there's a neat little space pirates game. You buy an NFT ship, you buy some space missles, some fuel, contract a crew, and you go out. Maybe the dollar cost of all this was $60. Cool. You go out, you blow up the first ship you found. You spent 3 missles at a cost of $10 each, but you got a whole ships worth of minerals worth $60, and some more missles. There's some capital gains! Now you keep going, and you blow up another ship (hey doing good buddy!) how do you calculate the cost basis for the missles you used? Your looted missles are mixed in with your purchased missles. You keep going, your ship is blown up, and now you need to write it off, fortunately you were able to recover some of your stuff because after your last battle you put some in storage. You had a great time, but now it's January and you have literally all the same tax problems as a legimite space pirate business.
- katmannthree 4y ago
  Wow, bravo. That is by far the strongest argument against NFTing games I've heard yet. It feels like it should be obvious and yet I've never seen it before.
  - m00dy 4y ago
    Imagination has no borders.
    - npc54321 4y ago
      His does sadly.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - practice9 4y ago
    Sound more like an argument against tax system in US
- edm0nd 4y ago
hahaxdxd123 4y ago
What does this look like in practice? Is everyone supposed to download 1TB worth of various skins to play a game? Who chooses which skins are eligible to be transferred into each game? Do I have to download and view other player's skins? idk if I want a Cyberpunk 2077 skin in Elden Ring pvp...
GingerBoats 4y ago
> play-to-earn model That's work. > “I think the idea of creating digital assets, and then taxing everyone for all the transactions around them is a good model,” Kan said. No way is there a large enough work & player base that would want this.
Animats 4y ago
"Top crypto VCs are constantly touting the potential of video games as one of the most compelling use cases for blockchain technology. Andreessen Horowitz partner Arianna Simpson, for example, who led the firm’s investment in crypto game Axie Infinity, has given countless interviews citing the play-to-earn model as a key catalyst to attracting “hundreds of millions” of people into web3." Axie Infinity is a Ponzi scheme in the collapse stage. It has two tokens - AXS (peak around US$150, today US$18), and SLP, the one gamers earn (peak around US$0.36, today $0.0048.) Anybody plugging Axie at this late date is either clueless or in on the scam. Probably the latter. “There’s a lot of cultural momentum around people equating blockchain with openness and trusting things that are decentralized on the blockchain.” Now that's an insightful remark. The blockchain crowd has convinced many people that they have something decentralized when, in fact, it's usually very centralized. Try, as Moxie Marlinspike did, to do something with NFTs that OpenSea doesn't like. The people buying "virtual land" don't get anything that can't be taken from them by the system operator. It's possible to host NFT images on IPFS, which is distributed, but someone usually has to keep up the payments on the IPFS bill. As for trust, that ship has sailed.
throw149102 4y ago
I don't have anything to add except fuck Web3, fuck NFTs, fuck play-to-earn, fuck the blockchain, and fuck anyone supporting this garbage. Gamers despise the cryptocurrency craze that bought up their graphics cards to generate random numbers and will never support it en-mass. Maybe if I have anything to add, it's that gamers already dislike cosmetics without any blockchain nonsense. Cosmetics hurt esports and other competitive gaming by messing with the trained instincts around color/silhouette, and thats before we talk about any actual pay to win mechanics.
- Nursie 4y ago
  That is a good point - the PC gaming community in particular hates cryptocurrency with an absolute vengeance because of what's happened with graphics cards, among other things. Anything that goes near crypto, web3, NFTs is instantly disliked and treated with disgust.
zerocrates 4y ago
It's just the same usual blockchain problem over again. The blockchain part itself that allows some token that you can trade around, that's well established. The part where that bridges the gap over into something real or useful (even something that's already very digital like a video game skin) is where it all collapses. The usual problem type I seem to see is something along the lines of: "to make this work, you need to introduce some trusted party, and then if you're going to trust them anyway you might as well have just had them run a database." For games the more salient point is that to have your "cross-game transferable items" system work, you need buy-in from the developers, who generally all already have jealously-guarded disconnected microtransaction systems that they're making enormous profits off of and they're not really incentivized at all to let other people play in their sandbox. Let's ignore for the time being the mechanics of actually making cross-game, cross-engine, cross-genre items work at all in the first place. The hope for proponents would seem to be to jump-start the ecosystem in games they create and create a groundswell of gamers who demand that big titles work with the blockchain system, but that just doesn't seem realistic for a variety of reasons. Even within the hypothetical universe of NFT-ized games, the same kinds of incentives (and technical issues) are likely to throw up similar barriers to interoperability between different games.
- mattdesl 4y ago
  > to make this work, you need to introduce some trusted party, and then if you're going to trust them anyway you might as well have just had them run a database. Having some elements of centralization does not negate some of the benefits of building on an open source and permissionless blockchain. I wrote a little more in a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32418873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32418873
- openfuture 4y ago
  This thing you are talking about is called the oracle problem. The solution to it is to move away from centrally coordinated definitions. This also means central currencies built on on a decentralized computation of some kind (i.e. blockchains). You can see why that is not compatible with the narrative coming from the sky... there'd be no safe store of value.. how to become rich with no metric? Question is (for me at least) who is going to be the first giant to betray the current economic system as the real world collapse becomes too obvious to ignore (hint: they'll probably be actually competent).
vlunkr 4y ago
These crypto gaming people are so entertaining. They combine all of the worst elements to come out of gaming in the last couple of decades, leave gaping holes in their implementation plans, then present it like it's the next iPhone. Truly brilliant.
- strikelaserclaw 4y ago
  A lot of people are looking for the next big thing since the internet, and all the truly revolutionary things are hard (much harder than building a website or an app), so you get a lot of people trying very hard with block chain technology, to make it the next internet.
Animats 4y ago
Maybe "Web3" is over. * 2017 - the year of 3D TV. * 2019 - the year of VR. * 2021 - the year of Web3. Let's check the meme department. Looking at Google Trends (US) for "NFT", "Web3", and "metaverse", they all peaked in late 2021 and are way down since then. There are still people talking about Decentraland as if it were a big deal.[1] Right now, 401 connected users. Sominium Space is in single digits. Sandbox and Facebook/Meta Horizon don't give out numbers, but they're not huge and are probably shrinking. I'm very interested in metaverse technology, but it's not coming from the "Web3" crowd. In China, virtual worlds on mobile are big, but they don't involve crypto. [1] https://decentraland.github.io/catalyst-monitor/ https://decentraland.github.io/catalyst-monitor/
- coffee_beqn 4y ago
  It’s annoying how many people talk about “web3” like it will inevitably become just as popular as the internet is today. The internet is the ultimate outlier. Web3 might just as easily end up as a Tamagotchi or Virtual Boy or Adventure Game or Zip drive or Kazaa or MySpace or Google+ or iPod or LAN party or Google Glass or.. you get the idea. Just because you like a technology and are invested in it doesn’t mean it’ll become bigger than sliced bread.
  - Animats 4y ago
    I know. I think metaverses are a fun niche, and can grow, but I don't see everyone wearing VR goggles. AR goggles, as a phone replacement, though... Glassholes 3.0?
  - openfuture 4y ago
    The thing is; people can clearly see that the internet is going to be the foundation of our societal communication infrastructures (such as money, politics and other governance). Therefore technologies that enable that are somewhat inevitable... it's just all done in such bad faith that it leaves us reeling.
mattdesl 4y ago
I don’t put much stock into play to earn and current VC funded blockchain games. There’s two areas of blockchain gaming I think are interesting to explore: 1. Decentralized games like Dark Forest that allow a game developer to set rules in smart contracts, and users to build around that game permissionlessly.[1] 2. A new model for marketplaces, particularly user generated content. This could be for a game (eg: mods), or game engine (eg: unity assets), or just an app (eg: Figma plugins). The primary benefit here is minimizing the 2-30% take-rates of current intermediaries, adding interoperability across ecosystems (such as ownership of an asset across multiple competing app stores), faster settlements, and trustless withdrawals. This is probably another couple years away from happening as it requires robust zkEVM/zkRollup tech and better privacy features, which are currently constrained by computation & regulation. I wrote about this idea here.[2] [1] https://blog.zkga.me/ https://blog.zkga.me/ [2] https://gist.github.com/mattdesl/ec2bf085b19407695b23cb90f6fdd2b7 https://gist.github.com/mattdesl/ec2bf085b19407695b23cb90f6f...
- yunohn 4y ago
  > The primary benefit here is minimizing the 2-30% take-rates of current intermediaries Why would said intermediaries spend R&D time and money implementing a system that reduces their take rate?? > to set rules in smart contracts Why exactly does this need to run on a generic chain like ETH with unnecessary overhead and fees, to function?
  - mattdesl 4y ago
    Intermediaries like Apple are not the ones building and interested in this, it is the game developers like those currently building Dark Forest and their players. This should not run on ETH mainnet, it should run on a L2 rollup that allows transactions to be submitted with fees that are in fractions of a cent. The L2 can be built atop ETH to allow users to permissionlessly withdraw tokens to it and to inherit the security of that chain.
    - yunohn 4y ago
      Apple/Google do not want to allow fee-less in-app transactions. The game developers also don’t want to allow a free in-game market. This is something only consumers want, but then the creators won’t make money. Either way, consumers won’t get to decide this. Why do you need a roll up? What security do you need if the L2 itself is able to manage a simple ledger…
relaxatorium 4y ago
The word “fun” doesn’t show up until paragraph 19 and that’s the problem with these kinds of games in a nutshell.
khazhoux 4y ago
For years I played Team Fortress 2, where everyone was so proud of the hilarious hats we'd collect from achievements and special events. In retrospect, I can see that we weren't actually having fun, because those hats were not stored in a permanent blockchain.
- ackbar03 4y ago
  It's OK,justin kan's here to save you
- beebeepka 4y ago
  I've been playing that game since the beta and never bought into the whole vanity thing. Hats almost completely ruined the game and even today half the community servers are just drop grounds for vullshit items.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    It does feel weird in context of original design language. Which they very heavily promoted that each character has unique silhouette that is recognizable from very far away... That just feels like destroying their own game. I'm much less against CSGO way, where it really didn't change how models looked.
lern_too_spel 4y ago
Among all the harebrained Web3 ideas I've heard, Web3 gaming takes the cake as the least sensible. Instead of commoditizing its complements (GPUs), it makes them inaccessible.
pavlov 4y ago
Crypto “web3” is a world where the only real and good thing is day trading, and the center of everyone’s life is a stock trading UI. Everything else is a pale reflection of the objects that can be day traded: games and art now exist to support the day trading nirvana, not the other way around. It’s understandable that this world seems appealing to venture capitalists and others whose lives revolve around finance. It’s completely unclear why anyone else should want it.
- malermeister 4y ago
  It's the ultimate triumph of shallow capitalism over all that makes us human. We should do our best not to let it come to pass.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    Video games are supposed to be the fun zoney they want to tear the fun zone down.
keyle 4y ago
Every time I read web3, I get a little taste of vomit in my mouth. Let me ask you this, if this wasn't complete farts, why would you need to call it 'web3 games'? What do games have to do with the web, and the so called "future of the web"? Games provide value through entertainment. They can have a line connection to other people but it's not the premise. “I think the idea of creating digital assets, and then taxing everyone for all the transactions around them is a good model,” Kan said. Mind blown. Here is the reality... Huge amount of excitement and false tales of freedom being meddled into just about anything they can, for the benefit of snake oil artists.
zitterbewegung 4y ago
Instead of using cryptocurrencies to add independence in games why couldn’t a platform like Steam do the same thing? The trading card system is quite close. I have a real hard time understanding on how to use cryptocurrencies to create interoperability when game publishers could do it already or just make a standard API with the games you want to partner with which would probably end up being a competitor to steam. NFTs being bought and sold also needs to go through KYC and AML and that’s a nightmare to games with any in game currency since they don’t want to become money transfer authorities for obvious reasons such as money laundering. So just making an interoperability layer that just goes to points going to buying a game would best way to do this instead of this unnecessarily convoluted system that has downtime that you can’t control and variable prices on execution of contracts. Also slowdowns.
- drak0n1c 4y ago
  I think the motivating factor is an idealistic vision of eventually moving beyond Steam's corporate DRM and percentage cut taken out of all gamer and game dev transactions. Innovators are usually reluctant to entrench the incumbent monopoly firm (recall how IBM was regarded). Agreed that pragmatically speaking Steam may be able to stand up something more efficient and functional than any crypto aspirants in the short term. There was a similar debate on potential interoperability between the dominant social networks and Youtube etc, people wanted an open source, open-governance transfer standard that various networks could plug in to. They didn't want Facebook to own that standard, and now that has evolved into the ownership question of the "metaverse".
- charcircuit 4y ago
  >why couldn’t a platform like Steam do the same thing It definitely could. But as a society do we want 1 private company deciding how commerce in video games is done and governing its participants and potentially taking a cut from everyone. Web3 supporters think the platform that provides this should be decentralized and not controlled by a single entity.
baby 4y ago
My read on the advances of blockchain is that it allows monetizing everything on the internet. When the internet started the biggest sell was e-commerces. Soon after people started dreaming about tipping blogs and webpages, crowdfunding, donating to projects online, charging a fee on Tor, making people pay to message zuck on fb, send money in whatsapp, etc. I think it opens a lot of doors, but gaming is definitely not a door I’m excited to open.
- malermeister 4y ago
  I feel like more monetization is the opposite of what the internet needs. This might just be "old man yelling at cloud" stuff, but to me the "best time" in the internet was when people were just using it to genuinely share their weird interests, before monetization came along and ruined it. I'd rather not have monetization ruin more stuff. Why does everything always have to be commercialized?
  - baby 4y ago
    > I feel like more monetization is the opposite of what the internet needs. I don't agree. There's not one "need" for the internet. The internet, as any technology, enables use cases by being more flexible. Enabling the money feature for the internet will lead to more use cases. > This might just be "old man yelling at cloud" stuff, but to me the "best time" in the internet was when people were just using it to genuinely share their weird interests, before monetization came along and ruined it. Looking at how big open source is today, or content sharing (youtube, blogs, etc.), I don't think I can agree with you
    - jfengel 4y ago
      I always read that as "wasn't it great when the Internet was mostly nerds exactly like me, and all the things people created had me in their target audience?" There's plenty of "weird interests" on the Internet. More of it than ever. It's harder to find your specific thing... but not that hard. If the centaur furries and left-handed pickleball players can do it, so can you.

63 points by unripe_syntax 4y ago

> “I think the idea of creating digital assets, and then taxing everyone for all the transactions around them is a good model,” Kan said. I don't think he has the slightest idea what players want, because this isn't it. This is exactly what players are raging against: games optimized for the creators' greed, not for the players' enjoyment. It doesn't sound like more fun than an existing game by that description, and we know from Axie's collapse that no one plays these games for fun.

kodah 4y ago
I think the problem is that in the short term gamers signal their approval by buying skins, which is what he goes on to talk about later in the article. A metaverse where these skins are transportable game to game. He's trying to analog these outfits to outfits you would buy at a store. Once gamers see how much they've dumped into things that will never produce anything of value, they're a bit ticked. Gamers who know other gamers who have done it I suspect are also ticked if they don't feel the short term peer pressure. At some point the distribution will lean, but I think we're a ways away from that.
- eli 4y ago
  > A metaverse where these skins are transportable game to game. I question how desirable that even is. So like some rich kid buys a golden suit and can wear it in a bunch of games...I mean, sure, ok? Not really groundbreaking stuff. Would you buy a game because it lets you do that? Assuming the total cost is the same, I'd just as soon buy different skins in each of my games...assuming I care about skins at all. And that's setting aside the really significant implementation challenges.
  - ohCh6zos 4y ago
    I think any developer that implements this would be in between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand it becomes impossible to have a consistent aesthetic or theme if you liberally allow people to bring their own assets, and on the other if you allow it but somehow map resources into your aesthetic the owners will almost certainly feel ripped off. As a player I think I would find it less than desirable to be playing Darkest Dungeon and view Halo content next to cartoon Fallguys. The NFT owner probably wants more than their NFT transformed into bytes and used as a random seed to determine the grain on their wooden shield. They almost certainly want a direct map to their resource.
  - clarle 4y ago
    Maybe I'm out of touch these days but I don't see how Web3 in this scenario is also better than just a standardized API schema that's shared across different games or platforms. The developer still needs to implement how this skin or texture is applied in their specific game, so there's still net additional work per skin or texture. You don't just get it for free as soon as someone else implements it in one game.
    - rcacho 4y ago
      The Web3 part of this would be that no company needs to be responsible for the database that says that a player is in possession of a particular item. The fact that limited cooperation between companies is needed is what could allow the adoption of standardized schemas. I'd be curious if even that would be so simple. There could be competing blockchains or types of NFTs. You might also get into the situation where instead of every company building the software to verify ownership they just pay specialized companies.In that situation Web3 technology isn't really all that different than a company building a virtual shop API. A company like Valve could probably do this better than Opensea could and without all the extra Web3 technology.
  - SaltyBackendGuy 4y ago
    > I question how desirable that even is I am with you, but I am a bit more cynical after watching my 6-10 year old nephews get into gaming. All they care about are the skins, it's insane to me but they really like it. Knowing that makes me dislike this angle more because I feel like their entire market vertical will be 6-10 years olds with their parents money. Not to mention the whole, creating addicts out of kids in the name of digital consumerism.
- cowtools 4y ago
  I suppose it makes sense if the NFT is used as a fundraising method for a Free/Open source game, but the mentality that games should respect each other's NFTs is a bit in-congruent with that. There's this idea of the "metaverse" which I think is informed entirely from fiction and hype. It's very detached from the actual incentives at play.
- SkyMarshal 4y ago
  > A metaverse where these skins are transportable game to game. Is this even viable? Can a skin from say an Unreal engine game be copied over to and used in a Unity engine game?
  - runako 4y ago
    Disclaimer: I'm not a game dev. The technical problem is probably the smaller issue. The larger issue is that the publishers of the respective games have to allow this type of cross-usage, and they do not have an incentive to make their games interoperable with other games. Even in business software, where there are practical incentives to interop, compatibility at the level of asset sharing remains very rare.
  - Animats 4y ago
    > Can a skin from say an Unreal engine game be copied over to and used in a Unity engine game? With difficulty, yes. If you have the asset in the creator tools, rather than just inside the game as a game user, it's straightforward. There's some standardization in this area, and it's getting better. There are now open formats. Look up "GLTF" and "USD" formats. Until about two years ago, most content was interchanged in proprietary formats, but we're now past that. The Khronos Group, which standardized Vulkan, is behind this standardization effort. Currently, you can usually move rigid objects from one platform to another, but articulated skeletons and scripted objects need manual rework to port. "Ripping" models from games is a thing. There are tools. NFTs do not enable asset portability. They are part of a DRM system. The goal of the DRM is to prevent more asset portability than someone wants. This only works if the receiving system pays attention to the DRM. There's no technical obstacle right now to finding the JPEG for a Bored Ape Yacht Club and printing it as a poster for your wall. But you won't be able to mint it as a new NFT and sell it on OpenSea, because OpenSea checks.
    - josefx 4y ago
      > There are now open formats. Look up "GLTF" and "USD" formats. We had fbx for decades, only difference is that it wasn't open source. Even better USD is an art format, nearly every concept it supports is for art direction, comparison of various designs, hiding of details that may get in the way of some modellers work. It isn't dynamic, it doesn't even have the concept of level of detail, so it will render a 10 million poly model even if all you see is a three pixel wide spot on the screen.
cinntaile 4y ago
Plenty of players happily pay Steam 30% of the sale value of their ingame items.
- smt88 4y ago
  Web3 and in-game items are completely unrelated. Crypto and Web3 add nothing to in-game items for either developers or players. Items are inherently centralized and cannot be decentralized because games can choose to stop supporting them.
  - powerhour 4y ago
    Games can stop supporting decentralized items, and if every game you care about does, the item may as well have been centralized to begin with. What's the difference? I'm not asking about the technology, I'm asking about the user experience.
    - toofy 4y ago
      > the item may as well have been centralized to begin with. that’s exactly the point. this adds nothing new or interesting for any party involved (except the scammer and their marketing people)
  - cinntaile 4y ago
    It's a digital asset, it's taxed by 30% each time it gets sold. Players happily pay the price. It's the perfect counterexample to your claim that players rage against taxing digital assets on each transaction. It's just not true. When you can't see something so blatantly obvious, it tells me you are very emotional about this and further discussion won't really lead anywhere. So I'm out.
    - smt88 4y ago
      > It's a digital asset, it's taxed by 30% each time it gets sold. Yes. So what? That's already possible without crypto. The game developer decides which player owns what items, and they can charge for item transfers if they want to. > Players happily pay the price. This has nothing to do with what I said, and I didn't dispute it. Digital assets are valuable (and have been for decades), and players certainly are happy to pay for them. > It's the perfect counterexample to your claim that players rage against taxing digital assets on each transaction. Counterexample != data. Most players don't want crypto in their games. A few players who tolerate it don't mean anything. But really, I've conflated two points I was making, which is my bad. Point 1: Crypto adds nothing to digital assets in gaming. They are inherently centralized and can't be decentralized. Point 2: Games like Axie Infinity, where the gameplay is terrible and serves only as a thin veneer over a speculative market, are not something gamers want. They only serve the creators. > When you can't see something so blatantly obvious If it's obvious, why can't you make an argument beyond, "People buy digital assets"? What value does crypto add? What are some games that people would not play if they weren't crypto-enabled? As a player, what benefit does crypto provide me? How does it make the game better or more fun?
ohCh6zos 4y ago
I'm not certain a game is better because it contains 'digital assets'? I know that psychologically I can't play games that have ads for buyable things or stores available in the program itself, so I don't have any belief I would be able to play these either.
loceng 4y ago
At its foundation it sounds like rent seeking.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  Inducting artificial scarcity to seek rent seems like a parody of capitalism by some 20th century communist. And yet here we are
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    Video games would be no where as large today if they weren't allowed to introduce artificial scarcity. This is the entire point of copyright law too. Artificial scarcity allows people to monetize their creations.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
The current model of in-game purchases also seems completely broken to me tbh
jspaetzel 4y ago
Some people like this, those people are gamblers, not gamers.

game-of-throws 4y ago

I look forward to the future where North Korean hackers exploit a bug in a smart contract to steal everybody's Fortnite costumes

eli 4y ago

Without "luring players with profit" isn't it just a video game? What makes it web3? What features require a blockchain?

s17n 4y ago
this is addressed in the article: > he admitted that building this interoperable ecosystem, which he sees as the future of video games overall, doesn’t technically require blockchain technology at all. > > “Blockchain is just the way that it’s going to happen, I think, because there’s a lot of cultural momentum around people equating blockchain with openness and trusting things that are decentralized on the blockchain.” (actually I think he's understating the case here, representing ownership is a real use case for blockchains)
- eli 4y ago
  But blockchain only has "cultural momentum" because of the lure of profits. Is there an example of a popular blockchain project that isn't based on "early buys can get rich by selling to latecomers"? I guess the argument boils down to "it's web3 because it has blockchain, and it has blockchain because that's a good marketing buzzword." Which, fair enough, I guess. That could be right. Blockchain-backed or not, I think it's pretty unlikely that a bunch of competing game companies are going to come up with a system that lets you share items between games. That sounds technically and politically very hard, and for not a lot of benefit.
- Judgmentality 4y ago
  So basically blockchain is going to coincidentally solve a problem that it's not explicitly needed for? Honestly I can see this happening, but regardless of it being blockchain or a vanilla API it's worthless without everybody (game developers, game publishers, gamers, marketplace owners) agreeing to work on it together. The assets only have value if they're portable, and they're only portable if everybody agrees the assets are valuable enough to spend time/money/infrastructure supporting. It's a very weird chicken-and-egg problem and I think it's a long way from being solved. Part of the reason is because some of the necessary players see a financial incentive not to solve this problem.

dumpsterlid 4y ago

Question, how did mobile gaming, a medium of games that runs on devices almost everybody has on them at all times completely destroy consumer confidence in the medium and atrophy innovation and growth in said medium for years and years? The answer? It was full of people like Justin Kan that look into the future of gaming and had such miserable imaginations that all they could envision larger, more predatory monetization models instead of yah know... new games and new experiences. Maybe crypto bullshit is the future of video games, but that will only be because capitalism burned out and exploited every last passionate game developer who wanted to make a good game because they love games.

cowtools 4y ago
I think it comes down to the marketplace. The Apple/Google "app store" allows that model to work, and the consumers don't seem to mind. It is basically the flash games that were popular years ago, but now with immediate access to parents' credit cards.

carlosdp 4y ago

The whole "play-to-earn" concept isn't actually that popular in web3 builder circles, in my experience. The companies that work on that just spend a ton of money on marketing, and Axie's valuation went so high for a while, that it keeps getting mainstream attention. I think he's totally right, though I don't think he does a great job of explaining why blockchain tech can be beneficial for gamers. Here's some of my quick thoughts on potential benefits: - Credibly neutral in-game item marketplaces: I think this will take a long time to get any traction, to be honest, because while these marketplaces are super centralized around Steam (Valve) and Epic today, gamers don't currently face any major issues with those marketplaces. I think the way this tech takes off is when more marketplaces die because EA decides to start and then kill one, and everyone loses their items they paid money for, because they don't have any sovereignty over their purchase. There is already discomfort among gamers about the current world of DRM, where a game can become unusable because the company decides to shut down a server 5-10 years later. - Sustainable game server hosting: on that note, it's becoming less common that people are able to host their own servers for multiplayer online games. When you are able to, funding those servers has usually been either donation based, or in the modern day perhaps requiring a Patreon subscription. Tying in the easy value-moving crypto provides, it is possible to make games that make it really easy for players to "pay" for the servers they use, and smart contracts can be used to coordinate incentivizing and compensating people/services who run servers for those games, in transparent ways and perhaps using value capture that is built into the game (ie. if you buy a hat, maybe a % automatically goes to a fund that pays out to servers you play on). This could make it possible for game servers to essentially always exist as long as 1 player wants to play it, any time in the future. In other words, we can have the convenience of online games, but with the permanence and resilience of DOOM. - Interoperability of digital items: when people talk about this, they usually talk about being able to use a gun from one game and bring it into another game. I think that's suuuuupeerrr far off, if a good idea ever at all. The much more straightforward, and I think cool, idea around this is basically: if your special skins are NFTs, that makes them automatically compatible with any and all apps and protocols that support NFTs out of the box. So you can stake them in an online poker game that supports NFTs, sell them in any NFT marketplace/auction house, and sure, bring it to your metaverse house or whatever and keep it in your virtual house. Compute-level interoperability is the most powerful aspect of crypto/blockchain, imo. I also think Justin is wrong about not needing blockchain. I agree that in theory, some other solution could provide the right incentives and interfaces to support this ecosystem of composability and interoperability with native value transfer, but I think you'll just end up re-inventing something that looks kinda like blockchains we have today. This has also been proven time and time again by new alternative chains that strip off the parts they find "pointless" and expensive, and end up realizing why they need it later. Overall: Headline is correct, in my opinion, and I think a lot if not most of the web3 builder world is on the same page today. I wouldn't over-index on the other stuff he said, though.

xor99 4y ago

The metaverse and web3 will make life worse (e.g. gradual loss of body and neuroprivacy, home privacy, financial privacy etc) and have a ridiculously high energy cost

mark242 4y ago

You look at the biggest games of the year: God of War, Elden Ring, Stray, etc. Shoehorning in NFT-style assets into these games is just a ridiculous proposal, especially ones with any kind of "marketplace" that you would have to support. All of the time and effort and maintenance and customer service, all of that would hit the bottom line of the game. The better studios -- that is, the ones who make game-of-the-year candidates -- just won't bother when they can be spending their finite development time on the game itself. And the idea that they'd buy into a cross-game shared-asset economy is just ludicrous and is a fundamental misunderstanding of P&L at a studio level. There is absolutely zero chance of, say, EA and Activision collaborating on a spec to share assets across brands. Zero, no matter how much you could spin it to executives. "So a BF player could use COD skins?" would get you laughed out of your pitch.

thr0wawayf00 4y ago
> There is absolutely zero chance of, say, EA and Activision collaborating on a spec to share assets across brands. Zero, no matter how much you could spin it to executives. We're seeing the startup mentality being applied to generate these new markets within gaming and people just aren't buying it. It's such an intellectually dishonest argument to make that players want to be able to share assets across games as you point out, yet we're seeing these highly-respected tech leaders try to convince us that such a brain-dead idea is visionary. Why? Because they stand to make another fortune on it and they have absolutely no problem lying to our faces about it.
- duskwuff 4y ago
  And the closely related concept of being able to transfer functional game items between games, or sell them on the open market, is even more ridiculous. Not only is it completely incompatible with any concept of game balance, but it's really just a roundabout way of saying that every game should be pay-to-win (by buying items outside the game) -- which is a mechanic which most gamers hate.
  - malermeister 4y ago

vegcel 4y ago

The concept of a web3 Roblox is probably the best conceptualization of a web3 gaming platform. -There's a virtual marketplace of skins/clothes that can be used from game to game motivated by a creator economy (basically NFTs) -Game devs can make money from in-game purchases A pro of this system would be more ownership of the IP holders, wherein they aren't getting extremely unfavorable rates like in the case of young devs for Roblox. Living outside of the central authority of Roblox Inc would be a positive and a negative.

upupandup 4y ago
and theres no need for cryptocurrencies that are unstable and volatile. simply allow purchase of tokens directly so that its guaranteed to be pegged at 1:1 without an intermediate wash trading crypto exchange. this whole web3/crypto craze is bizarre. just literally reinventing words for what we had since the beginning of the internet in hopes of raising funds by shoving buzzwords at VCs who are probably not going to make it by next year when interest rates shoot up

swalsh 4y ago

In theory, I actually like the idea of games connected to the blockchain. The issue is, now your little funtime activity has serious tax implications. Imagine this, there's a neat little space pirates game. You buy an NFT ship, you buy some space missles, some fuel, contract a crew, and you go out. Maybe the dollar cost of all this was $60. Cool. You go out, you blow up the first ship you found. You spent 3 missles at a cost of $10 each, but you got a whole ships worth of minerals worth $60, and some more missles. There's some capital gains! Now you keep going, and you blow up another ship (hey doing good buddy!) how do you calculate the cost basis for the missles you used? Your looted missles are mixed in with your purchased missles. You keep going, your ship is blown up, and now you need to write it off, fortunately you were able to recover some of your stuff because after your last battle you put some in storage. You had a great time, but now it's January and you have literally all the same tax problems as a legimite space pirate business.

katmannthree 4y ago
Wow, bravo. That is by far the strongest argument against NFTing games I've heard yet. It feels like it should be obvious and yet I've never seen it before.
- m00dy 4y ago
  Imagination has no borders.
  - npc54321 4y ago
    His does sadly.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- practice9 4y ago
  Sound more like an argument against tax system in US
edm0nd 4y ago

hahaxdxd123 4y ago

What does this look like in practice? Is everyone supposed to download 1TB worth of various skins to play a game? Who chooses which skins are eligible to be transferred into each game? Do I have to download and view other player's skins? idk if I want a Cyberpunk 2077 skin in Elden Ring pvp...

GingerBoats 4y ago

> play-to-earn model That's work. > “I think the idea of creating digital assets, and then taxing everyone for all the transactions around them is a good model,” Kan said. No way is there a large enough work & player base that would want this.

Animats 4y ago

"Top crypto VCs are constantly touting the potential of video games as one of the most compelling use cases for blockchain technology. Andreessen Horowitz partner Arianna Simpson, for example, who led the firm’s investment in crypto game Axie Infinity, has given countless interviews citing the play-to-earn model as a key catalyst to attracting “hundreds of millions” of people into web3." Axie Infinity is a Ponzi scheme in the collapse stage. It has two tokens - AXS (peak around US$150, today US$18), and SLP, the one gamers earn (peak around US$0.36, today $0.0048.) Anybody plugging Axie at this late date is either clueless or in on the scam. Probably the latter. “There’s a lot of cultural momentum around people equating blockchain with openness and trusting things that are decentralized on the blockchain.” Now that's an insightful remark. The blockchain crowd has convinced many people that they have something decentralized when, in fact, it's usually very centralized. Try, as Moxie Marlinspike did, to do something with NFTs that OpenSea doesn't like. The people buying "virtual land" don't get anything that can't be taken from them by the system operator. It's possible to host NFT images on IPFS, which is distributed, but someone usually has to keep up the payments on the IPFS bill. As for trust, that ship has sailed.

throw149102 4y ago

I don't have anything to add except fuck Web3, fuck NFTs, fuck play-to-earn, fuck the blockchain, and fuck anyone supporting this garbage. Gamers despise the cryptocurrency craze that bought up their graphics cards to generate random numbers and will never support it en-mass. Maybe if I have anything to add, it's that gamers already dislike cosmetics without any blockchain nonsense. Cosmetics hurt esports and other competitive gaming by messing with the trained instincts around color/silhouette, and thats before we talk about any actual pay to win mechanics.

Nursie 4y ago
That is a good point - the PC gaming community in particular hates cryptocurrency with an absolute vengeance because of what's happened with graphics cards, among other things. Anything that goes near crypto, web3, NFTs is instantly disliked and treated with disgust.

zerocrates 4y ago

It's just the same usual blockchain problem over again. The blockchain part itself that allows some token that you can trade around, that's well established. The part where that bridges the gap over into something real or useful (even something that's already very digital like a video game skin) is where it all collapses. The usual problem type I seem to see is something along the lines of: "to make this work, you need to introduce some trusted party, and then if you're going to trust them anyway you might as well have just had them run a database." For games the more salient point is that to have your "cross-game transferable items" system work, you need buy-in from the developers, who generally all already have jealously-guarded disconnected microtransaction systems that they're making enormous profits off of and they're not really incentivized at all to let other people play in their sandbox. Let's ignore for the time being the mechanics of actually making cross-game, cross-engine, cross-genre items work at all in the first place. The hope for proponents would seem to be to jump-start the ecosystem in games they create and create a groundswell of gamers who demand that big titles work with the blockchain system, but that just doesn't seem realistic for a variety of reasons. Even within the hypothetical universe of NFT-ized games, the same kinds of incentives (and technical issues) are likely to throw up similar barriers to interoperability between different games.

mattdesl 4y ago
> to make this work, you need to introduce some trusted party, and then if you're going to trust them anyway you might as well have just had them run a database. Having some elements of centralization does not negate some of the benefits of building on an open source and permissionless blockchain. I wrote a little more in a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32418873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32418873
openfuture 4y ago
This thing you are talking about is called the oracle problem. The solution to it is to move away from centrally coordinated definitions. This also means central currencies built on on a decentralized computation of some kind (i.e. blockchains). You can see why that is not compatible with the narrative coming from the sky... there'd be no safe store of value.. how to become rich with no metric? Question is (for me at least) who is going to be the first giant to betray the current economic system as the real world collapse becomes too obvious to ignore (hint: they'll probably be actually competent).

vlunkr 4y ago

These crypto gaming people are so entertaining. They combine all of the worst elements to come out of gaming in the last couple of decades, leave gaping holes in their implementation plans, then present it like it's the next iPhone. Truly brilliant.

strikelaserclaw 4y ago
A lot of people are looking for the next big thing since the internet, and all the truly revolutionary things are hard (much harder than building a website or an app), so you get a lot of people trying very hard with block chain technology, to make it the next internet.

Animats 4y ago

Maybe "Web3" is over. * 2017 - the year of 3D TV. * 2019 - the year of VR. * 2021 - the year of Web3. Let's check the meme department. Looking at Google Trends (US) for "NFT", "Web3", and "metaverse", they all peaked in late 2021 and are way down since then. There are still people talking about Decentraland as if it were a big deal.[1] Right now, 401 connected users. Sominium Space is in single digits. Sandbox and Facebook/Meta Horizon don't give out numbers, but they're not huge and are probably shrinking. I'm very interested in metaverse technology, but it's not coming from the "Web3" crowd. In China, virtual worlds on mobile are big, but they don't involve crypto. [1] https://decentraland.github.io/catalyst-monitor/ https://decentraland.github.io/catalyst-monitor/

coffee_beqn 4y ago
It’s annoying how many people talk about “web3” like it will inevitably become just as popular as the internet is today. The internet is the ultimate outlier. Web3 might just as easily end up as a Tamagotchi or Virtual Boy or Adventure Game or Zip drive or Kazaa or MySpace or Google+ or iPod or LAN party or Google Glass or.. you get the idea. Just because you like a technology and are invested in it doesn’t mean it’ll become bigger than sliced bread.
- Animats 4y ago
  I know. I think metaverses are a fun niche, and can grow, but I don't see everyone wearing VR goggles. AR goggles, as a phone replacement, though... Glassholes 3.0?
- openfuture 4y ago
  The thing is; people can clearly see that the internet is going to be the foundation of our societal communication infrastructures (such as money, politics and other governance). Therefore technologies that enable that are somewhat inevitable... it's just all done in such bad faith that it leaves us reeling.

mattdesl 4y ago

I don’t put much stock into play to earn and current VC funded blockchain games. There’s two areas of blockchain gaming I think are interesting to explore: 1. Decentralized games like Dark Forest that allow a game developer to set rules in smart contracts, and users to build around that game permissionlessly.[1] 2. A new model for marketplaces, particularly user generated content. This could be for a game (eg: mods), or game engine (eg: unity assets), or just an app (eg: Figma plugins). The primary benefit here is minimizing the 2-30% take-rates of current intermediaries, adding interoperability across ecosystems (such as ownership of an asset across multiple competing app stores), faster settlements, and trustless withdrawals. This is probably another couple years away from happening as it requires robust zkEVM/zkRollup tech and better privacy features, which are currently constrained by computation & regulation. I wrote about this idea here.[2] [1] https://blog.zkga.me/ https://blog.zkga.me/ [2] https://gist.github.com/mattdesl/ec2bf085b19407695b23cb90f6fdd2b7 https://gist.github.com/mattdesl/ec2bf085b19407695b23cb90f6f...

yunohn 4y ago
> The primary benefit here is minimizing the 2-30% take-rates of current intermediaries Why would said intermediaries spend R&D time and money implementing a system that reduces their take rate?? > to set rules in smart contracts Why exactly does this need to run on a generic chain like ETH with unnecessary overhead and fees, to function?
- mattdesl 4y ago
  Intermediaries like Apple are not the ones building and interested in this, it is the game developers like those currently building Dark Forest and their players. This should not run on ETH mainnet, it should run on a L2 rollup that allows transactions to be submitted with fees that are in fractions of a cent. The L2 can be built atop ETH to allow users to permissionlessly withdraw tokens to it and to inherit the security of that chain.
  - yunohn 4y ago
    Apple/Google do not want to allow fee-less in-app transactions. The game developers also don’t want to allow a free in-game market. This is something only consumers want, but then the creators won’t make money. Either way, consumers won’t get to decide this. Why do you need a roll up? What security do you need if the L2 itself is able to manage a simple ledger…

relaxatorium 4y ago

The word “fun” doesn’t show up until paragraph 19 and that’s the problem with these kinds of games in a nutshell.

khazhoux 4y ago

For years I played Team Fortress 2, where everyone was so proud of the hilarious hats we'd collect from achievements and special events. In retrospect, I can see that we weren't actually having fun, because those hats were not stored in a permanent blockchain.

ackbar03 4y ago
It's OK,justin kan's here to save you
beebeepka 4y ago
I've been playing that game since the beta and never bought into the whole vanity thing. Hats almost completely ruined the game and even today half the community servers are just drop grounds for vullshit items.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  It does feel weird in context of original design language. Which they very heavily promoted that each character has unique silhouette that is recognizable from very far away... That just feels like destroying their own game. I'm much less against CSGO way, where it really didn't change how models looked.

lern_too_spel 4y ago

Among all the harebrained Web3 ideas I've heard, Web3 gaming takes the cake as the least sensible. Instead of commoditizing its complements (GPUs), it makes them inaccessible.

pavlov 4y ago

Crypto “web3” is a world where the only real and good thing is day trading, and the center of everyone’s life is a stock trading UI. Everything else is a pale reflection of the objects that can be day traded: games and art now exist to support the day trading nirvana, not the other way around. It’s understandable that this world seems appealing to venture capitalists and others whose lives revolve around finance. It’s completely unclear why anyone else should want it.

malermeister 4y ago
It's the ultimate triumph of shallow capitalism over all that makes us human. We should do our best not to let it come to pass.
- imtringued 4y ago
  Video games are supposed to be the fun zoney they want to tear the fun zone down.

keyle 4y ago

Every time I read web3, I get a little taste of vomit in my mouth. Let me ask you this, if this wasn't complete farts, why would you need to call it 'web3 games'? What do games have to do with the web, and the so called "future of the web"? Games provide value through entertainment. They can have a line connection to other people but it's not the premise. “I think the idea of creating digital assets, and then taxing everyone for all the transactions around them is a good model,” Kan said. Mind blown. Here is the reality... Huge amount of excitement and false tales of freedom being meddled into just about anything they can, for the benefit of snake oil artists.

zitterbewegung 4y ago

Instead of using cryptocurrencies to add independence in games why couldn’t a platform like Steam do the same thing? The trading card system is quite close. I have a real hard time understanding on how to use cryptocurrencies to create interoperability when game publishers could do it already or just make a standard API with the games you want to partner with which would probably end up being a competitor to steam. NFTs being bought and sold also needs to go through KYC and AML and that’s a nightmare to games with any in game currency since they don’t want to become money transfer authorities for obvious reasons such as money laundering. So just making an interoperability layer that just goes to points going to buying a game would best way to do this instead of this unnecessarily convoluted system that has downtime that you can’t control and variable prices on execution of contracts. Also slowdowns.

drak0n1c 4y ago
I think the motivating factor is an idealistic vision of eventually moving beyond Steam's corporate DRM and percentage cut taken out of all gamer and game dev transactions. Innovators are usually reluctant to entrench the incumbent monopoly firm (recall how IBM was regarded). Agreed that pragmatically speaking Steam may be able to stand up something more efficient and functional than any crypto aspirants in the short term. There was a similar debate on potential interoperability between the dominant social networks and Youtube etc, people wanted an open source, open-governance transfer standard that various networks could plug in to. They didn't want Facebook to own that standard, and now that has evolved into the ownership question of the "metaverse".
charcircuit 4y ago
>why couldn’t a platform like Steam do the same thing It definitely could. But as a society do we want 1 private company deciding how commerce in video games is done and governing its participants and potentially taking a cut from everyone. Web3 supporters think the platform that provides this should be decentralized and not controlled by a single entity.

baby 4y ago

My read on the advances of blockchain is that it allows monetizing everything on the internet. When the internet started the biggest sell was e-commerces. Soon after people started dreaming about tipping blogs and webpages, crowdfunding, donating to projects online, charging a fee on Tor, making people pay to message zuck on fb, send money in whatsapp, etc. I think it opens a lot of doors, but gaming is definitely not a door I’m excited to open.

malermeister 4y ago
I feel like more monetization is the opposite of what the internet needs. This might just be "old man yelling at cloud" stuff, but to me the "best time" in the internet was when people were just using it to genuinely share their weird interests, before monetization came along and ruined it. I'd rather not have monetization ruin more stuff. Why does everything always have to be commercialized?
- baby 4y ago
  > I feel like more monetization is the opposite of what the internet needs. I don't agree. There's not one "need" for the internet. The internet, as any technology, enables use cases by being more flexible. Enabling the money feature for the internet will lead to more use cases. > This might just be "old man yelling at cloud" stuff, but to me the "best time" in the internet was when people were just using it to genuinely share their weird interests, before monetization came along and ruined it. Looking at how big open source is today, or content sharing (youtube, blogs, etc.), I don't think I can agree with you
  - jfengel 4y ago
    I always read that as "wasn't it great when the Internet was mostly nerds exactly like me, and all the things people created had me in their target audience?" There's plenty of "weird interests" on the Internet. More of it than ever. It's harder to find your specific thing... but not that hard. If the centaur furries and left-handed pickleball players can do it, so can you.