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Going against the usual knee jerk "crypto bad" reaction, I don't think nft-s are inherently bad in games. All the usual hatepoints (microtransactions, pay to wi

Going against the usual knee jerk "crypto bad" reaction, I don't think nft-s are inherently bad in games. All the usual hatepoints (microtransactions, pay to win, developer still controls the use of the nfts, etc) are true or can be true with or without items being nfts. The difference I care about is tradability and transferability, which is inherent to nft-s but not to normal in-game items. For example hearthstone, blizzard's warcraft tcg, would be much better for nft cards. It would get a second hand card market similar to MTG automatically if it used nft cards on some public blockchain.

monero-xmr 3y ago
The only difference between an in-game economy where items are transferable and an NFT version is that you can withdraw the items to neutral third-party exchanges and you can see the total inventory of items in the game at all times. I think there are benefits to having an open economy. With the switch to proof-of-stake blockchains the environmental argument is moot. I don’t see what the big deal is with NFT hate other than a general push back against developers overly-monetizing (but then again, who will pay for servers?) and general hate for crypto.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
erwinh 3y ago
Stuff like this would be interesting but I think could only work if all art assets are then also uploaded to IPFS, game code is made open source so anyone could run/build/modify the game experience without any permission of the original publisher. No game business seem to be really committing to that full picture yet…
- pornel 3y ago
  If the game is open source, you can add whatever items you want, without any blockchain nonsense.
  - erwinh 3y ago
    True from a pure solo experience perspective, blockhains are a social construct so only relevant between people. I can imagine e.g. wanting to matchmake against only those players in a tcg who will play with the cards they have on-chain.
thaumasiotes 3y ago
> For example hearthstone, blizzard's warcraft tcg, would be much better for nft cards. It would get a second hand card market similar to MTG automatically if it used nft cards on some public blockchain. The experiment is going on right now. You can play MTGO or MTG Arena. Which one's more popular?
- proto-n 3y ago
  No idea, which one is more popular? Also, can you please try to argue why?
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    > Also, can you please try to argue why? You don't think it's enough to remind you that, given the choice between the two options you describe, people overwhelmingly preferred the one that you said was "worse"? If I don't bother telling you why I think that is, will it be less true? What if I'm wrong about the reason -- will that stop the phenomenon from happening?
ManlyBread 3y ago
All NFT based items have the same problem where these items rely on the goodwill of the people who make the games and they're the ones that end up deciding whether the item has any practical value or if it's even in the game in the first place. If I were a game dev I'd have no incentive to implement some foreign NFTs in the game when I can make my own NFTs or just go with the classic model where the items are just entries in one of my databases. There's also a conflict of interest in where someone who is both a dev and has a lot of certain NFTs could attempt to make the in-game item busted or required for competitive meta in order to sell out their stock of NFTs at a high price. The "card game with NFTs" has already been tried, it's called "Gods Unchained" and didn't really catch on because if you type "Gods Unchained" in YouTube search bar the top results are not about the game itself but about the fact that you can earn money in-game. People actually interested in playing the game end up playing with bots because the game has a profit incentive.
- proto-n 3y ago
  > these items rely on the goodwill of the people who make the games But they rely on the goodwill of the game devs regardless of the items being NFT-s. Patches causing meta changes is a regular thing without NFT-s. > someone who is both a dev and has a lot of certain NFTs could attempt to make the in-game item busted or required for competitive meta in order to sell Or just do the same and sell the card in the in-game store for lots of $? As lots of mobile games do.
  - GTP 3y ago
    Yes, so what added value do NFTs bring to the table after all?
- xk_id 3y ago
  > If I were a game dev I'd have no incentive to implement some foreign NFTs in the game By implementing some foreign NFTs you can bootstrap an existing userbase (especially one with clear on chain evidence for engaging with a similar game). Another incentive can be satisfying the presumed demand for interoperable assets, such as avatars (being able to play with the same avatar in different games).
polygamous_bat 3y ago
> The difference I care about is tradability and transferability, which is inherent to nft-s but not to normal in-game items. I think you simply do not understand the usual NFT hatepoints, then, which is the vision of NFTs you are espousing is simply undeliverable. Either you have a truly decentralized network that is necessarily expensive to run to prevent spamming, and you add all of your in-game items and transactions to that. This action slows the network down to a crawl, and makes each item swap cost hundreds of dollars in gas fees. Given how even AAA games are costing $60-70 these days, I hope you understand why that's underdesirable. "What about layer 2???" you may ask. Well, if you would like to go a more centralized route by having a separate blockchain handle all of your in-game transactions, I can point to Axie Infinity [1] to tell you why that's a bad idea. Basically, in the dark forest of blockchain, centralization breeds failure, and unless you're happy with losing more than half a billion (!) dollars worth of "assets" from time to time, that is also quite unappetizing. Tl;dr: if you're espousing NFTs for gaming after all of these, you either don't understand blockchain/NFTs, don't understand gaming, or have money to make by pump-and-dumping crypto tokens. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/6/23196713/axie-infinity-ronin-blockchain-hack-phishing-linkedin-job-offer https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/6/23196713/axie-infinity-ron...
- mattdesl 3y ago
  Axie Infinity used a proof-of-authority side chain secured by a multisig bridge. It was not what most people refer to as L2s - which can achieve the same scalability as a side chain but with much stronger security properties (using validity or fraud proofs), and without compromising on decentralization. There’s certainly a good case to be made for NFTs and blockchains in games, but you first have to overcome their associated stigma and misconceptions.
gelert 3y ago
Blizzard could make their own second hand hearthstone marketplace if they wanted to. NFTs don't create that possibility. Blizzard judged that it's more profitable for them to be the sole sellers of cards at their price. While NFTs would enable secondary markets in hearthstone cards to exist outside of Blizzard's ecosystem Blizzard doesn't want you out of their ecosystem. Furthermore even if they introduced something like that I highly doubt they'd use "some public blockchain" the risks from that would outweigh the benefits - they'd just make their own infrastructure internally. I don't see a way in which NFTs solve a problem that can't already be solved more simply. After all valve secondary markets for games like TF2 have existed for more than a decade without needing NFTs.
- proto-n 3y ago
  You are kind of arguing my point. Blizzard won't do it because it loves exploiting their status against the player. But that's a point for nft-s, it would make it harder to exploit players. Yeah I agree it won't ever happen, but if it did, that would be a win.
  - kergonath 3y ago
    But then if the developers were willing to go that route, they could do it perfectly well without NFTs, and that would be just as much of a win.
    - proto-n 3y ago
      I never said NFT-s were required or the only possible solution, I said that I don't think NFT-s in games are inherently bad or evil (which is a quite popular opinion)
    - xk_id 3y ago
      Not “perfectly” well. There is the downside of cost. Without nfts they would have to invest in bespoke infrastructure for creating, storing, validating and trading the assets. With nfts, this entire infrastructure already exists.
AstixAndBelix 3y ago
Imagine justifying a second hand card market for DIGITAL GOODS. I'm sorry, I'm completely tired by this bullshit. If a multiplayer (and competitive) videogame does not have everything unlocked then it's just a scam and time sink.
p1necone 3y ago
> are true or can be true with or without items being nfts Yeah this is kind of the point - the NFTs aren't adding any value.

monero-xmr 3y ago

The only difference between an in-game economy where items are transferable and an NFT version is that you can withdraw the items to neutral third-party exchanges and you can see the total inventory of items in the game at all times. I think there are benefits to having an open economy. With the switch to proof-of-stake blockchains the environmental argument is moot. I don’t see what the big deal is with NFT hate other than a general push back against developers overly-monetizing (but then again, who will pay for servers?) and general hate for crypto.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

erwinh 3y ago

Stuff like this would be interesting but I think could only work if all art assets are then also uploaded to IPFS, game code is made open source so anyone could run/build/modify the game experience without any permission of the original publisher. No game business seem to be really committing to that full picture yet…

pornel 3y ago
If the game is open source, you can add whatever items you want, without any blockchain nonsense.
- erwinh 3y ago
  True from a pure solo experience perspective, blockhains are a social construct so only relevant between people. I can imagine e.g. wanting to matchmake against only those players in a tcg who will play with the cards they have on-chain.

thaumasiotes 3y ago

> For example hearthstone, blizzard's warcraft tcg, would be much better for nft cards. It would get a second hand card market similar to MTG automatically if it used nft cards on some public blockchain. The experiment is going on right now. You can play MTGO or MTG Arena. Which one's more popular?

proto-n 3y ago
No idea, which one is more popular? Also, can you please try to argue why?
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > Also, can you please try to argue why? You don't think it's enough to remind you that, given the choice between the two options you describe, people overwhelmingly preferred the one that you said was "worse"? If I don't bother telling you why I think that is, will it be less true? What if I'm wrong about the reason -- will that stop the phenomenon from happening?

ManlyBread 3y ago

All NFT based items have the same problem where these items rely on the goodwill of the people who make the games and they're the ones that end up deciding whether the item has any practical value or if it's even in the game in the first place. If I were a game dev I'd have no incentive to implement some foreign NFTs in the game when I can make my own NFTs or just go with the classic model where the items are just entries in one of my databases. There's also a conflict of interest in where someone who is both a dev and has a lot of certain NFTs could attempt to make the in-game item busted or required for competitive meta in order to sell out their stock of NFTs at a high price. The "card game with NFTs" has already been tried, it's called "Gods Unchained" and didn't really catch on because if you type "Gods Unchained" in YouTube search bar the top results are not about the game itself but about the fact that you can earn money in-game. People actually interested in playing the game end up playing with bots because the game has a profit incentive.

proto-n 3y ago
> these items rely on the goodwill of the people who make the games But they rely on the goodwill of the game devs regardless of the items being NFT-s. Patches causing meta changes is a regular thing without NFT-s. > someone who is both a dev and has a lot of certain NFTs could attempt to make the in-game item busted or required for competitive meta in order to sell Or just do the same and sell the card in the in-game store for lots of $? As lots of mobile games do.
- GTP 3y ago
  Yes, so what added value do NFTs bring to the table after all?
xk_id 3y ago
> If I were a game dev I'd have no incentive to implement some foreign NFTs in the game By implementing some foreign NFTs you can bootstrap an existing userbase (especially one with clear on chain evidence for engaging with a similar game). Another incentive can be satisfying the presumed demand for interoperable assets, such as avatars (being able to play with the same avatar in different games).

polygamous_bat 3y ago

> The difference I care about is tradability and transferability, which is inherent to nft-s but not to normal in-game items. I think you simply do not understand the usual NFT hatepoints, then, which is the vision of NFTs you are espousing is simply undeliverable. Either you have a truly decentralized network that is necessarily expensive to run to prevent spamming, and you add all of your in-game items and transactions to that. This action slows the network down to a crawl, and makes each item swap cost hundreds of dollars in gas fees. Given how even AAA games are costing $60-70 these days, I hope you understand why that's underdesirable. "What about layer 2???" you may ask. Well, if you would like to go a more centralized route by having a separate blockchain handle all of your in-game transactions, I can point to Axie Infinity [1] to tell you why that's a bad idea. Basically, in the dark forest of blockchain, centralization breeds failure, and unless you're happy with losing more than half a billion (!) dollars worth of "assets" from time to time, that is also quite unappetizing. Tl;dr: if you're espousing NFTs for gaming after all of these, you either don't understand blockchain/NFTs, don't understand gaming, or have money to make by pump-and-dumping crypto tokens. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/6/23196713/axie-infinity-ronin-blockchain-hack-phishing-linkedin-job-offer https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/6/23196713/axie-infinity-ron...

mattdesl 3y ago
Axie Infinity used a proof-of-authority side chain secured by a multisig bridge. It was not what most people refer to as L2s - which can achieve the same scalability as a side chain but with much stronger security properties (using validity or fraud proofs), and without compromising on decentralization. There’s certainly a good case to be made for NFTs and blockchains in games, but you first have to overcome their associated stigma and misconceptions.

gelert 3y ago

Blizzard could make their own second hand hearthstone marketplace if they wanted to. NFTs don't create that possibility. Blizzard judged that it's more profitable for them to be the sole sellers of cards at their price. While NFTs would enable secondary markets in hearthstone cards to exist outside of Blizzard's ecosystem Blizzard doesn't want you out of their ecosystem. Furthermore even if they introduced something like that I highly doubt they'd use "some public blockchain" the risks from that would outweigh the benefits - they'd just make their own infrastructure internally. I don't see a way in which NFTs solve a problem that can't already be solved more simply. After all valve secondary markets for games like TF2 have existed for more than a decade without needing NFTs.

proto-n 3y ago
You are kind of arguing my point. Blizzard won't do it because it loves exploiting their status against the player. But that's a point for nft-s, it would make it harder to exploit players. Yeah I agree it won't ever happen, but if it did, that would be a win.
- kergonath 3y ago
  But then if the developers were willing to go that route, they could do it perfectly well without NFTs, and that would be just as much of a win.
  - proto-n 3y ago
    I never said NFT-s were required or the only possible solution, I said that I don't think NFT-s in games are inherently bad or evil (which is a quite popular opinion)
  - xk_id 3y ago
    Not “perfectly” well. There is the downside of cost. Without nfts they would have to invest in bespoke infrastructure for creating, storing, validating and trading the assets. With nfts, this entire infrastructure already exists.

AstixAndBelix 3y ago

Imagine justifying a second hand card market for DIGITAL GOODS. I'm sorry, I'm completely tired by this bullshit. If a multiplayer (and competitive) videogame does not have everything unlocked then it's just a scam and time sink.

p1necone 3y ago

> are true or can be true with or without items being nfts Yeah this is kind of the point - the NFTs aren't adding any value.