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Gaming is actually a pretty reasonable use case for NFT's, or blockchain generally. At it's core, an NFT is a digital asset with verifiable ownership. Many, man

Gaming is actually a pretty reasonable use case for NFT's, or blockchain generally. At it's core, an NFT is a digital asset with verifiable ownership. Many, many games have the concept of owning digital assets; the fact that they're not on a blockchain is an implementation detail. All the hype around monkey-ape pictures and microtransactions was offputting to a lot of gamers, making the whole thing come off like a big cash-grab (which it mostly was), but from a purely technological standpoint, blockchain might not be a terrible solution for games with transferable digital assets.

wnevets 2y ago
its gonna happen its just around the corner!
- throw646577 2y ago
  It's like tapping HN on the knee with a reflex hammer, isn't it?
throwaway48476 2y ago
Most people are tired of 400gb of cosmetics. They want less but higher quality. The NFT people also lied through their teeth about how NFTs work.
- LargeWu 2y ago
  So, the use case I'm thinking of is more along the lines of non-cosmetic assets. Take FIFA Ultimate Team, for example. The way it works currently is that each player in the game has one or more "cards", or sets of stats. Special versions come out all the time which have significant impact on gameplay. FIFA has an in-game market where you can buy/sell/trade cards, for in-game scrip. Want to sell your special Killian Mbappe card you just pulled? Congrats, you can get 1,000,000 FifaCoins, not redeemable for real money. Of course, you can certainly buy FifaCoins for real money. A blockchain implementation could potentially allow people to sell that card directly to somebody else, for real money (or more specifically, crypto tokens that can be redeemed for real money). Would you rather have 1,000,000 FifaCoins, or $100? Whether or not this is desirable to games is a different question, but the game is already essentially pay-to-win, so it's not like it would ruin the game from that perspective. It already has microtransactions. The main reason you probably won't be seeing this is because it would cut the publisher (EA) out of the loop, which is very, very lucrative for them.
  - nemomarx 2y ago
    if EA wanted to set it up so you could sell them for real money, with ea taking a cut, I think they could. of course they don't really want to let you do that, but even putting aside banking steam let's you sell cards for steam wallet money (which goes back to valve) and let's you buy cheap games for "free". it's never really seemed like a limitation that needs a technical back end to fix it, it needs people to want to set it up.
  - awkward 2y ago
    The best example of this is probably the Diablo 3 real money auction house. It was a launch feature of the game that would allow items to be sold for real money or in game gold. It was removed about eighteen months in, because it made the metagame significantly less fun. Switching from a localized rarity table with some light trading to an efficient global market meant that finding anything less than best in class equipment (bounded to level) was a disappointment compared to what could be bought on the market, and had to be to avoid flooding market supply. Getting rid of the market and implementing more generous local loot algorithms probably gave the game at least 5 years more life.
    - LargeWu 2y ago
      Thanks for the history lesson. I think this is a much more compelling argument than "blockchain dumb".
gs17 2y ago
> the fact that they're not on a blockchain is an implementation detail. For a good reason. The blockchain doesn't add much over a database. Players being able to sell their items? Steam does that without a blockchain, albeit not for real money. Being able to take items between games? Almost no devs (or players) really want that. But blockchain would add difficulty changing things if there's a bug with the items (or not, but you lose the "security" it's supposed to add).
- LargeWu 2y ago
  If you invested hundreds of hours into a game and accumulated a significant pile of rare items with in-game utility, and then decided you were done with the game, would you rather a) have the option to sell them for real money or b) have the option to sell them for in-game currency (which you will never use) or c) not have any marketplace options?
  - duskwuff 2y ago
    c). I play games to have fun, not to make money. And I'd rather not play games where success is determined by how willing you are to open your wallet.
  - nerdjon 2y ago
    You're talking about a closed system for a single game though, what exactly does a blockchain actually give you in that example? All 3 of those are possible with a traditional database. Even if they wanted to provide a system for sharing those assets and other marketplaces being able to built on top of it, a blockchain still doesn't actually provide any benefits.
  - bobthepanda 2y ago
    A lot of them intentionally are not supposed to be sold for real value because in many jurisdictions, combining that with lootbox or drop mechanics would immediately make the game subject to gambling regulations. Game dev companies don’t want that, they want to keep selling you stuff. See: games like the Sims
  - 2y ago
vohk 2y ago
From a purely technological standpoint, a boring database does everything an NFT could for transferable digital assets. This is the classic "solution looking for a problem" you see so often with NFTs and blockchain generally. The proposed problems (in this case verifiable and transferable ownership) already have mature, satisfactory solutions. NFTs don't benefit consumers (because the tangible value exists in a centralized server somewhere anyway) and they don't benefit publishers (who can already implement those features if they cared to). They benefit people that want to get rich speculating on NFTs.
simonw 2y ago
Blockchain is a terrible solution for games with transferable digital assets. How does the game developer benefit from outsourcing their inventory management system like that? What if they release an in-game item that turns out to be completely over-powered and want to change or remove it? (Amusingly enough the original inspiration for Ethereum was that Vitalik Buterin hated that his warlock got nerfed: https://www.polygon.com/22709126/ethereum-creator-world-of-warcraft-nerf-nft-vitalik-buterin https://www.polygon.com/22709126/ethereum-creator-world-of-w... )
- gs17 2y ago
  > What if they release an in-game item that turns out to be completely over-powered and want to change or remove it? I'm not sure how/if real "crypto games" do it, but it wouldn't be impossible to have a list of "invalid" items the smart contract references that can't be used unless you use a second contract the developer set up to exchange them for the nerfed version. And I guess that could enable community-created formats with their own banlists (if the game is actually decentralized enough for that to be possible). But then we've had to do a lot of extra work for a messy version of what we can already do with a normal database!
- LargeWu 2y ago
  Depending on the use case, you don't need to store the entire implementation of the item on chain, just a reference to it. All the implementation could still be stored game-side. You could also apply nerfs/buffs over the top of an item at runtime.
- Zambyte 2y ago
  > How does the game developer benefit from outsourcing their inventory management system like that? Why should I care about how a third party in the transaction feels? > What if they release an in-game item that turns out to be completely over-powered and want to change or remove it? Then they can do that. A token being associated with a wallet is orthogonal to an item being rendered or used in a game.
smitelli 2y ago
Can’t I just enjoy playing a game for however many hours without having to buy shit?
ClassyJacket 2y ago
There is no use case for NFTs at all. The "verifiable ownership" is pointless when you could just use a traditional database, as every individual game has to respect the blockchain - they could just respect the database instead, and not use the power consumption of Belgium to do it.
quickthrowman 2y ago
Why would any game publisher relinquish the insanely high profit margin DLC/skins they sell to an outside third party? It makes zero sense, they can just use a SQL database and keep all of the profits. In short, publishers aren’t going to give the crazy margins they make on digital in-game items to a third party NFT blockchain, they’d be insane to do so.

wnevets 2y ago

its gonna happen its just around the corner!

throw646577 2y ago
It's like tapping HN on the knee with a reflex hammer, isn't it?

throwaway48476 2y ago

Most people are tired of 400gb of cosmetics. They want less but higher quality. The NFT people also lied through their teeth about how NFTs work.

LargeWu 2y ago
So, the use case I'm thinking of is more along the lines of non-cosmetic assets. Take FIFA Ultimate Team, for example. The way it works currently is that each player in the game has one or more "cards", or sets of stats. Special versions come out all the time which have significant impact on gameplay. FIFA has an in-game market where you can buy/sell/trade cards, for in-game scrip. Want to sell your special Killian Mbappe card you just pulled? Congrats, you can get 1,000,000 FifaCoins, not redeemable for real money. Of course, you can certainly buy FifaCoins for real money. A blockchain implementation could potentially allow people to sell that card directly to somebody else, for real money (or more specifically, crypto tokens that can be redeemed for real money). Would you rather have 1,000,000 FifaCoins, or $100? Whether or not this is desirable to games is a different question, but the game is already essentially pay-to-win, so it's not like it would ruin the game from that perspective. It already has microtransactions. The main reason you probably won't be seeing this is because it would cut the publisher (EA) out of the loop, which is very, very lucrative for them.
- nemomarx 2y ago
  if EA wanted to set it up so you could sell them for real money, with ea taking a cut, I think they could. of course they don't really want to let you do that, but even putting aside banking steam let's you sell cards for steam wallet money (which goes back to valve) and let's you buy cheap games for "free". it's never really seemed like a limitation that needs a technical back end to fix it, it needs people to want to set it up.
- awkward 2y ago
  The best example of this is probably the Diablo 3 real money auction house. It was a launch feature of the game that would allow items to be sold for real money or in game gold. It was removed about eighteen months in, because it made the metagame significantly less fun. Switching from a localized rarity table with some light trading to an efficient global market meant that finding anything less than best in class equipment (bounded to level) was a disappointment compared to what could be bought on the market, and had to be to avoid flooding market supply. Getting rid of the market and implementing more generous local loot algorithms probably gave the game at least 5 years more life.
  - LargeWu 2y ago
    Thanks for the history lesson. I think this is a much more compelling argument than "blockchain dumb".

gs17 2y ago

> the fact that they're not on a blockchain is an implementation detail. For a good reason. The blockchain doesn't add much over a database. Players being able to sell their items? Steam does that without a blockchain, albeit not for real money. Being able to take items between games? Almost no devs (or players) really want that. But blockchain would add difficulty changing things if there's a bug with the items (or not, but you lose the "security" it's supposed to add).

LargeWu 2y ago
If you invested hundreds of hours into a game and accumulated a significant pile of rare items with in-game utility, and then decided you were done with the game, would you rather a) have the option to sell them for real money or b) have the option to sell them for in-game currency (which you will never use) or c) not have any marketplace options?
- duskwuff 2y ago
  c). I play games to have fun, not to make money. And I'd rather not play games where success is determined by how willing you are to open your wallet.
- nerdjon 2y ago
  You're talking about a closed system for a single game though, what exactly does a blockchain actually give you in that example? All 3 of those are possible with a traditional database. Even if they wanted to provide a system for sharing those assets and other marketplaces being able to built on top of it, a blockchain still doesn't actually provide any benefits.
- bobthepanda 2y ago
  A lot of them intentionally are not supposed to be sold for real value because in many jurisdictions, combining that with lootbox or drop mechanics would immediately make the game subject to gambling regulations. Game dev companies don’t want that, they want to keep selling you stuff. See: games like the Sims
- 2y ago

vohk 2y ago

From a purely technological standpoint, a boring database does everything an NFT could for transferable digital assets. This is the classic "solution looking for a problem" you see so often with NFTs and blockchain generally. The proposed problems (in this case verifiable and transferable ownership) already have mature, satisfactory solutions. NFTs don't benefit consumers (because the tangible value exists in a centralized server somewhere anyway) and they don't benefit publishers (who can already implement those features if they cared to). They benefit people that want to get rich speculating on NFTs.

simonw 2y ago

Blockchain is a terrible solution for games with transferable digital assets. How does the game developer benefit from outsourcing their inventory management system like that? What if they release an in-game item that turns out to be completely over-powered and want to change or remove it? (Amusingly enough the original inspiration for Ethereum was that Vitalik Buterin hated that his warlock got nerfed: https://www.polygon.com/22709126/ethereum-creator-world-of-warcraft-nerf-nft-vitalik-buterin https://www.polygon.com/22709126/ethereum-creator-world-of-w... )

gs17 2y ago
> What if they release an in-game item that turns out to be completely over-powered and want to change or remove it? I'm not sure how/if real "crypto games" do it, but it wouldn't be impossible to have a list of "invalid" items the smart contract references that can't be used unless you use a second contract the developer set up to exchange them for the nerfed version. And I guess that could enable community-created formats with their own banlists (if the game is actually decentralized enough for that to be possible). But then we've had to do a lot of extra work for a messy version of what we can already do with a normal database!
LargeWu 2y ago
Depending on the use case, you don't need to store the entire implementation of the item on chain, just a reference to it. All the implementation could still be stored game-side. You could also apply nerfs/buffs over the top of an item at runtime.
Zambyte 2y ago
> How does the game developer benefit from outsourcing their inventory management system like that? Why should I care about how a third party in the transaction feels? > What if they release an in-game item that turns out to be completely over-powered and want to change or remove it? Then they can do that. A token being associated with a wallet is orthogonal to an item being rendered or used in a game.

smitelli 2y ago

Can’t I just enjoy playing a game for however many hours without having to buy shit?

ClassyJacket 2y ago

There is no use case for NFTs at all. The "verifiable ownership" is pointless when you could just use a traditional database, as every individual game has to respect the blockchain - they could just respect the database instead, and not use the power consumption of Belgium to do it.

quickthrowman 2y ago

Why would any game publisher relinquish the insanely high profit margin DLC/skins they sell to an outside third party? It makes zero sense, they can just use a SQL database and keep all of the profits. In short, publishers aren’t going to give the crazy margins they make on digital in-game items to a third party NFT blockchain, they’d be insane to do so.