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There’s a lot of reasons this mechanism would be interesting for a game developer besides trust. e.g. mitigating payment processor fees. But to your question o

There’s a lot of reasons this mechanism would be interesting for a game developer besides trust. e.g. mitigating payment processor fees. But to your question of trust, one interesting application would be in distributed & decentralized games intended to be released to the commons, see Dark Forest or Lattice.xyz. For these OSS projects, even if the original game devs decided to stop development, the community could permissionlessly continue to build atop the game’s immutable contracts.

gmerc 3y ago
It’s a completely made up problem for which crypto is supposedly the solution - We’ve known for 2 decades how to do skin or items exchange between games. It involves relational databases. Valve does it for their games or at least could do it at will. There’s not one unsolved technical problem here - There is zero incentive for developers, publishers and licensors (you know the people that make up the game industry) to adopt any of it. My company dies, the licenses terminate and your items are toast. Technology does not at all change any of it because it’s not a technology problem. It’s a licensing problem. And if I paid for the license, by god no other developer else should get that value for free. - Developers don’t want other developers to affect their own games, affecting visual design, polygon budgets, performance, power or any other aspect of the game. No benefit, only drawbacks. - No, we don’t want you to bring your lightsaber or mickey mouse costume (you know assets that people actually find valuable) int our game because that’s a straight visit from the lawyers at the house of mouse and probably makes our carefully crafted game look like ass. - No middleman is only a problem if you need a middleman or the middleman fails to deliver value. Not if you can be the middleman. People attempt to muddle this down to a payments processor issue, but the last decade has shown crypto is just plain shit at that, from gas fees to security, lack of customer protection and any other dimension. And if it’s not payment, well, we could just as well use a database to share games between developers at the same publisher or valve. - People bring up demand for external markets like Diablo’s Auction house. But these demand economies are fractions of the overall game value systems and increasing the focus on the fraction very quickly erodes and destroys the main game. - IP licensors don’t benefit if people carry their IP from game to game unless game and game pay the fee - Publishers don’t want to give telemetry or data associated with the movement of players to others. Sorry, that’s just not a good idea. And they want to sell you items again, not you hoarding older items. Even gamers … don’t want it. They understand that this is mostly crypto bro driven attempts of turning every game into a gacha / real world money affects escapism fantasy for people with less money when every rich brat is parading their instagram assets through town. The only people who think this is a great idea (including Boz) are in silicon valley with a long history of failing to understand games.
- mattdesl 3y ago
  thank you for the rather long and opinionated soliloquy, which fails to actually address my comment or the projects I mentioned…
  - gmerc 3y ago
    You mean “There is lots of reasons why this would be interesting to game developers”, goes on not mentioning a single one ?
    - mattdesl 3y ago
      Why do I even bother to reiterate the rest of the paragraph that you did not quote? Game developers and their users are regularly exploited by App Store and payment processor fees. Transfers of ERC721 and ERC20 on an L2 is negligible by comparison: https://l2fees.info/ https://l2fees.info/
      - threeseed 3y ago
        Apple, Google etc aren't going to allow you to bypass their in-app purchasing system. Has been tried many times before and just results in your app being banned.
        mattdesl 3y ago
        Google recently changed tack on NFTs, allowing them in the Google Play stores, which means it is now allowed by their policy to circumvent the store fees for this use case. But the more obvious solution here is to not use the walled garden app stores at all, if you plan to monetize and distribute assets via crypto. Thankfully we do have the web and PWAs.
- starttoaster 3y ago
  I'm not even a crypto bro, but it's honestly more exhausting to listen to someone go on about how private backends with user facing storefronts and relational databases solve the same problems as blockchain, than it is to listen to a crypto bro explain why we can't trust companies to manage records in their own relational database.

gmerc 3y ago

It’s a completely made up problem for which crypto is supposedly the solution - We’ve known for 2 decades how to do skin or items exchange between games. It involves relational databases. Valve does it for their games or at least could do it at will. There’s not one unsolved technical problem here - There is zero incentive for developers, publishers and licensors (you know the people that make up the game industry) to adopt any of it. My company dies, the licenses terminate and your items are toast. Technology does not at all change any of it because it’s not a technology problem. It’s a licensing problem. And if I paid for the license, by god no other developer else should get that value for free. - Developers don’t want other developers to affect their own games, affecting visual design, polygon budgets, performance, power or any other aspect of the game. No benefit, only drawbacks. - No, we don’t want you to bring your lightsaber or mickey mouse costume (you know assets that people actually find valuable) int our game because that’s a straight visit from the lawyers at the house of mouse and probably makes our carefully crafted game look like ass. - No middleman is only a problem if you need a middleman or the middleman fails to deliver value. Not if you can be the middleman. People attempt to muddle this down to a payments processor issue, but the last decade has shown crypto is just plain shit at that, from gas fees to security, lack of customer protection and any other dimension. And if it’s not payment, well, we could just as well use a database to share games between developers at the same publisher or valve. - People bring up demand for external markets like Diablo’s Auction house. But these demand economies are fractions of the overall game value systems and increasing the focus on the fraction very quickly erodes and destroys the main game. - IP licensors don’t benefit if people carry their IP from game to game unless game and game pay the fee - Publishers don’t want to give telemetry or data associated with the movement of players to others. Sorry, that’s just not a good idea. And they want to sell you items again, not you hoarding older items. Even gamers … don’t want it. They understand that this is mostly crypto bro driven attempts of turning every game into a gacha / real world money affects escapism fantasy for people with less money when every rich brat is parading their instagram assets through town. The only people who think this is a great idea (including Boz) are in silicon valley with a long history of failing to understand games.

mattdesl 3y ago
thank you for the rather long and opinionated soliloquy, which fails to actually address my comment or the projects I mentioned…
- gmerc 3y ago
  You mean “There is lots of reasons why this would be interesting to game developers”, goes on not mentioning a single one ?
  - mattdesl 3y ago
    Why do I even bother to reiterate the rest of the paragraph that you did not quote? Game developers and their users are regularly exploited by App Store and payment processor fees. Transfers of ERC721 and ERC20 on an L2 is negligible by comparison: https://l2fees.info/ https://l2fees.info/
    - threeseed 3y ago
      Apple, Google etc aren't going to allow you to bypass their in-app purchasing system. Has been tried many times before and just results in your app being banned.
      - mattdesl 3y ago
        Google recently changed tack on NFTs, allowing them in the Google Play stores, which means it is now allowed by their policy to circumvent the store fees for this use case. But the more obvious solution here is to not use the walled garden app stores at all, if you plan to monetize and distribute assets via crypto. Thankfully we do have the web and PWAs.
starttoaster 3y ago
I'm not even a crypto bro, but it's honestly more exhausting to listen to someone go on about how private backends with user facing storefronts and relational databases solve the same problems as blockchain, than it is to listen to a crypto bro explain why we can't trust companies to manage records in their own relational database.