It also gives them a complete monopoly on their internal marketplace, so that's a nice bonus.
1. Create an asset flip game with steam trading cards.
2. Generate steam keys and give to bots
3. Bots farm the cards.
4. Convert the cards to steam gems.
5. Buy legit cards with gems.
6. Sell legit cards on Steam Marketplace.
7. Buy sought-after game on Steam.
8. Sell game on the gray market for real money.
Let me know if I messed up any of those steps. It's been a few years.
Can people still trade guns outside of CSGO?
I suspect OP is being sarcastic.
Not if you're the developer of the game.
Very low, perhaps. Each bot cost $5 in order to trade. That's an upfront cost, and can be reduced if they buy their asset flip. A certain number of Steam keys can be generated free by the developer. Asset flip games might be near free, depending on the assets. Developer accounts cost money, but again that's upfront. Bots can farm in VMs. There's money "lost" on Steam and gray market trades, but that money never really existed. Yes, it takes lots of time, but it's automated and scales decently.
Now people set up ways where the game is “gifted” to an email address where you copy the claim url and send that to the purchaser instead of a key.
For example the Garrys Mod Steam gift goes for ~9€ [1] while the key goes for ~16€ [2]
[1]https://www.g2a.com/garrys-mod-steam-gift-global-i1000000439... [2]https://www.g2a.com/garrys-mod-steam-key-global-i10000004391...
Also gems have absolutely horrible conversion ratio. I think lowest I can find in my inventory is 6 gems per copy of game. You can sell gems for 0.30€ per 1000... So 167 copies. And accounts...
Not to forget that it cost 100 dollars I think to release game on Steam...
I guess as always, I am looking for benefit of NFT/chain solution over simpler non-NFT/chain solution. I hear persistency, but in this case I don't see it in practical terms.
A smart game producer that sees a NFT-based game go down could say "hey, you know all those items you had on <game X>? Come over to my game and you'll get <benefit> based on that stuff!" Since ownership of the token is publicly visible and not locked into Game X's database.
It could also be used by anything else, really.
Lots of ideas where cross-game promotion could be done using NFTs to validate ownership of something in Game A within Game B without requiring the game developers to set up a specific intergame data link.
A lot of these suggestions fall foul of the same problem that they offer a great deal for the customer but not for the game maker. Which whilst altruistic is rather naive to commercial reality.
A value add model like the Amiibo would work better but again is predicated on developers actually capturing some revenue from supporting it.
If you ignore that NFTs are basically a glorfied registry for micro transactions.
This is like buying a $200 refill cup from a movie theater then being allowed to use it at a competing movie theater chain, except the cup isn't real. It was never a good deal, and there's no incentive for theater's to join in.
One of the big changes in the way I've viewed this is because the blockchain we're talking about already exists. A lot of the technology is already there so over time the idea of creating a new shared database and managing it becomes more work than just using some libraries and an existing shared database - even with limitations.
> A value add model like the Amiibo would work better but again is predicated on developers actually capturing some revenue from supporting it.
Selling the game, surely.
And that technology exists does not make a notional use of it something people actually want or need. The reason for a lack of co-marketing isn’t a lack of technology as the parts of my post you didn’t quote note.
This is not a solid business plan.
I feel like most of the NFT arguments I've read in this thread are assuming that somehow using an NFT gets you out of the cost of actually spending the art & dev time on producing the cosmetic - just because it exists in another game doesn't make it appreciably any cheaper to add to your game.
I will admit there are ways to make art more "valuable" by actually limiting the number of available copies - but that trendiness is hard to effectively harness. Beanie Babies took off in the 90s and everyone's brother started buying up newly released ones... almost all of which were worthless because they scaled up their production to meet demand - and if they hadn't they wouldn't have been easy to get a hold of.
So, its good for a competitor to the original game developer. What motivates the original developer? If they want to bootstrap a new game feom an old game user base and purchases DB, they can do it without a public database of assets while excluding competitors from the same opportunity.
Otherwise what's to stop multiple games trying to adopt the same group of NFTs?
> Otherwise what's to stop multiple games trying to adopt the same group of NFTs?
Nothing at all. Breaking data out of small silos into one large database opens up possibilities like this.
Anyone can mint an NFT to point to anything. There's no guarantee beyond what's traceable on the blockchain. Once the NFT "points" to something outside of the blockchain, then all bets are off.
they hardcode a content-addressable url (eg. ipfs). there's no domains to take over.
I feel like you're on the cusp of a penny drop moment here with blockchain
And I'm really not sure what you're getting at. This particular use of NFT is as certificate of unique ownership. That's what the original buyer thought they were obtaining.
Now - maybe they shouldn't or maybe they were deluded - but that's currently how NFTs are being marketed.
Isn't it?
Maybe they're all games you made, maybe they're all games built in a community, maybe it's a fan made extension of another game. Those all have reasons you may want to add access to something based on data from another game. Perhaps it's a core mechanic, where puzzles are only solvable by completing tasks in other games. Perhaps it's just letting you play as Guybrush Threepwood if you've played the first Monkey Island.
It doesn't have to be all within games. Gated access to communities perhaps (a speedrunning discord if you've got a certain achievement).
The ingenuity of game devs never ceases to surprise me, and sharing data between programs is fundamental to lots of interesting systems so the idea that sharable data between games provides no utility is odd to me.
I've worked in the gaming industry. Margins are incredibly tight and the timetables are usually extremely brutal. It'll take time to support different character models and swappable cosmetics have, on multiple occasions, resulted in game exploits. One of the early notable ones was Oddjob in Goldeneye[1] but you also often see clipping bugs where tall characters might clip through no pass boundaries and either insta-kill themselves or find a way to get out of bounds. These things have costs.
1. https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-08-23-21-years-after...
Also, bear in mind that you still need to cook all those meals (or, rather, do all the art for those cosmetics). And if you're making art you probably want your normal players to be able to give you money for it as well... and you might not want to give it away for free to players just because they supported this other company that's not you.
Why is this better than just "Come over to my game and get all the benefits that everyone gets, even if you didn't play <Game X>!"
> A smart game producer that sees a NFT-based game go down could say "hey, you know all those items you had on <game X>? Come over to my game and you'll get <benefit> based on that stuff!" Since ownership of the token is publicly visible and not locked into Game X's database.
So... Game X has enabled competitors to steal their customers by not using their own database. What exactly is the benefit here? If it's the same company they can just use their own database.
What if Game X and Game Y decide they don't get along and start to flood the network with items that are worthless in Game X and EXTREMELY VALUABLE in Game Y? There are so many reasons you don't want to cede control of your game world to a competitor company!
> Lots of ideas where cross-game promotion could be done using NFTs to validate ownership of something in Game A within Game B without requiring the game developers to set up a specific intergame data link.
Oh good, all we need is for all games to define their item data on a universal scheme that fits the needs of every single game.
This means if it’s a popular NFT, multiple games can support the asset by building support for it in game.
Additionally some games already have carryover content - it's rather rare but a good example is Total War: Warhammer - where DLCs from the first game also applied to the second game (i.e. allowing you to play the Wood Elves in Mortal Empires). The reasons these things are rare is that, except for some limited circumstances (like in TW: WH it was the same dev and publisher) you're usually cannibalizing your own sales to boost some other game's revenue which is just weird.
But people don't want Steam achievements: they are chasing the excitement, that's chasing the money, that's made by wash trading gifs.
That kind of microtransaction garbage is already ruining many games without the need for this NFT nonsense on top of it. The only people who want more of that are the people who think it’ll make them rich.
I think it is a generational gap thing. I myself (40 year old) play CS:GO quite a lot (I'm really bad at it as well haha), but don't care about all the stickers and other custom stuff that people buy there.
However, there's a huge market for those stickers. And there is people that really like spending money to "own" that stuff. I feel that my generation (X/xenials and older) don't have a strong sense of "digital property" (in the end, we grew at the time of napster, kazaa, edonkey, and downloading copies of anything digital. At the same time "games" were owned physically through NES, SNES, Gameboy, Genesis cartridges )
But for Millenails/Z, digital property comes more naturally and they "feel" the "ownage" of digital property.
An NFT is just a digital certificate stored on a blockchain. It's certainly not a scam and has perfectly legit uses.
For a variety of reasons, everything related to blockchain is ridiculously overhyped. What should be boring accounting technology is suddenly a pop culture fad, and that birthed thousands of get-rich-quick schemes.
It's a flaw in human behavior though, not a problem with NFTs or cryptocurrencies.
But hey, many have seen their friends have success in crypto while they've remained on the sidelines.. and they don't like it.
They'll defame blockchain & nfts to no end rather than attempt to seek understanding.
Intermediary-less digital ownership is incredibly powerful & will only grow in usage & utility by open-source evolving nature, perhaps exponentially.
Bitcoin was technically interesting. Whatever your stance on all the negatives in the real world, everybody agrees its elegant in theory. It combined problems to create a solution. That's what real innovation looks like.
NFT's as 'investments' are a scam. Claiming Git commit hashes as property is not valuable, innovative, or game-changing. From the bottom to the top of the pyramid its people who are salty they didn't make more money in 'crypto' and are afraid of missing out twice in their lives.
I can show an nft that represents a role, access to an event, a cross-game asset, as a property title, as a binding contract, rights to use intellectual property etc.
In theory, yes.
> It's a flaw in human behavior though, not a problem with NFTs or cryptocurrencies.
If you find another lifeform besides humans to market NFTs and cryptocurrencies to I'll buy this argument.
Just because scammers jumped all over it, and even if most NFTs are scams, that does nothing to overwrite the fact that there's a useful technology here, albeit with a niche purpose.
The problem is that people are using the hype to scam, that's human behavior, not an issue with NFTs themselves, which are just boring certificates.
I know it's possible, but I haven't seen any.
For NFT's this is even worse, because they not only claim to be magic internet money, they also (often) claim to represent a real world object or artwork, so you basically have two overvalued markets reinforcing one another. An NFT does not represent a ownership over anything more than the NFT itself unless it also comes with legal and/or physical possession of the thing it supposedly represents. If it comes with legal or physical possession then the NFT is not the core of the transaction, is it?
In theory an NFT is just anything on a blockchain that cannot be equally substituted. In practice it is a way to hype and scam.
Of course, you buy a house, not a deed. The fact that people are hideously misinformed about NFTs isn't a problem with NFTs though. It doesn't make any sense to me to blame the technology for people's ignorance.
The question I was asking (and perhaps I should have been more clear): If I'm not buying the house (I can't live in it), and I'm not buying the mortgage (as in a bank would), and I'm not buying a picture of the house (as in having exclusive rights to an image), but I am buying a hash of a specific image of the house, is that not a bit crazy?
And if you think it is but think there are better usecases for NFTs then I'd advise changing the acronym for your use-case because for me and a lot of other people NFT equals either scam or bubble. The term is tainted.
>Will you be asking me to provide tax information to you, and/or will you be providing 1099’s based on my transactions in the Community Market? No. Previously we required that U.S. citizens and residents provide us with certain information, including name, address and social security number, prior to exceeding 200 separate sales transactions in a calendar year. We have concluded that this information is not required and we will no longer be asking you for this information as part of Community Market participation. We will also not be providing IRS Form 1099’s with respect to sales activity in the Community Market.
With that in mind, it seems like you can money launder fairly easily, right? I thought that the 1099s were the primary blocker to that.
What you quoted is specifically for less than 200 transactions in a calendar year. The implication being that any account involving 200 or more transactions in a calendar year will need that information.
Which brings about two points.
1. Exactly how much money can someone launder buying < 200 csgo skins in a calendar year (are we arguing that they're paying $50k per skin?), and 2. How exactly does the idea that they've decided to take on some risk to decrease friction incompatible with not wanting to deal with NFT's, which *COULD* conceivably go for $50k a pop.
Obviously it's about control and understandably so because letting uncontrollable financial transactions happen within applications on your platform sounds like a legal nightmare waiting to happen.
It's basically just a next-gen version of the star registry scam that's been going on for decades. [1]
The latter is not extrinsic at all - it's all in the contracts on the blockchain.
I will grant it is slightly possible if we have a data destruction period between now and the 27th century. Claims to property after the nazis were overthrown could often be made by jewish residents with very little proof due to the fact that all the real proof was intentionally destroyed. But even those could end up extremely contentious. You can read up on Jewish Restitution[1] and you'll see a lot of really difficult cases that had to be dealt with.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_claims_for_restitution...
The existence of your stock ownership depends on a legal and social framework to exist. If the government was overthrown and you were exiled tomorrow, you have nothing. If an asteroid destroyed half the earth tomorrow, and you survived, you still have nothing.
You take for granted the systems in which you live and function in. There are many things we "own" and cannot touch, yet they are as real as anything. The money in your bank account is an example of that. It has value, you own it, but if we are stranded on a deserted island with no electricity or wifi, it ceases to exist to us.
That's true for most things we own these days, and it works quite well.
That's a great metaphor, but the issue is that NFTs are an order of magnitude more fake than stocks, money, etc.
Oh, that's the sports collectibles trading card industry.
NFTs on blockchains solve the problem of provenance and permanence.
You need to do a bit of effort and think about why anything is worth anything at all. Why is the Mona Lisa worth millions but a forgery worth nothing, even if they are indistinguishable from one another?
How much is a museum map from the Louvre with directions from the entrance to the current location of the Mona Lisa, signed the museum attendant worth haha.
They are of course distinguishable. One was actually physically created by the artist.
The images the URLs point at are 100% exactly identical, and you do not have the right to the image in question. You may not even have the right to display it to anyone.
You're just buying the plastic sleeves the baseball cards come in without the card itself.
> NFTs on blockchains solve the problem of provenance and permanence.
[edit] Not really no. After all the provenance is on faith that the person who originally sold the NFT is both the original creator of the work (or authorized to sell it) and that they have the legal right to do so, probably, who even knows.
Trust me, the judge is the judge of that, not the blockchain. Blockchains only actually work for concepts wholly encapsulated by the blockchain. Art is not that.
And as for permanence, no, it's just a URL. The contents may disappear, even in IPFS.
Art is represented and encapsulated by data.
The judge of provenance is society: whatever the buyer deems necessary to prove legitamacy is what sets value. An old rolex with papers is worth more than one without. A rolex that can't be identified as authentic by anyone is worth nothing.
An old Rolex with papers is worth more than without, but the papers without the Rolex are worth nothing. In this case you're just buying the papers.
Yes, you're starting to get it. You're not buying art, you're not buying legal rights. If the data was written directly to the blockchain, then it is permanent. But even if it points to some temporary host, big deal, the file itself wasn't the valuable part. Data can endlessly be replicated and rehosted.
It is the genuine provenance of an artist that was bought and traded. It is proof representing a work, whatever that artist declares it to be. They could simply resell it again for all anyone knows, but that would hurt them and devalue all their future work.
All value is abstract.
The papers without the Rolex can be worth anything anyone wants to pay for it. Following that rule I suppose fake papers can even be worth something, but most likely not.
Your blockchain will not be there in the future. Permanence? Not so much.
It is a decentralized network that has faced the test of government, natural disaster, organizational and technical risk, etc.
So no, maybe blockchains won't last "forever", but neither of us enough information to confirm either way. My bet is on blockchains outliving everyone typing on this forum.
Except that nothing about the asset is actually stored on a blockchain.
The Tate is the owner of the following certificate of ownership by Sol Le Witt:
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/lewitt-a-wall-divided-v...
Are they the victim of a scam?
Instead, draughtsmen will simply recreate it according to the instructions of the artist, as given in the diagram, at a new location.
See for example https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/lewitt-wall-drawing-113...:
"Wall Drawing #1136 can be installed, removed, and then reinstalled in another location, as many times as required for exhibition purposes. As such, there can also be periods of time in which the work does not exist in physical form."
For starters, let's take the Autoglyphs (https://www.larvalabs.com/autoglyphs): the smart contract gives a list of instructions for each piece that you can use to draw the final output.
Cool concept or scam?
How is the mode of ownership of this wall drawing different? The physical piece can change or disappear. What matters is who is recognised as the owner of the artwork an immaterial sense, as evidenced by the certificate.
The owner cares about the piece of paper but not because the typography is so sweet. The piece of paper is not the artwork. The piece of paper is a token.
"A glyph can be created by anyone who is willing to donate the creation fee of 0.20Ξ ($769) to our chosen charity, 350.org."
No, the glyph can be created by anyone who runs the code. And the code is publicly available. The "donation" is completely unrelated to the glyph, yet they try to trick you into thinking that both are connected.
The certificate will still be valuable even if the copyright on the work expires. If the artist would work with say WeWork to reproduce this work across their offices, the certificate still has value. The Tate is still able to resell that certificate.
It's actually not clear to me that Sol Le Witts estate could enforce a copyright claim on an "unauthorized reproduction", since describing a drawing in words is not the same thing as actually drawing it. But regardless, the copyright question is entirely incidental.
There is a reason why the guy didn't just drew the damn lines himself, and why his such an influential figure in art history. It's precisely because he intended to interrogate some of these ideas.
Note that even if we suppose your way of thinking about this, in terms of a license grant that will move over to any would-be buyer of this certificate, is the correct one, that means this certificate shown above either a) grants such a license implicitly, or b) a separate license grant is communicated somehow. In both cases, this is still exactly like an NFT, where artists often communicate licenses to buyers of NFT certificates.
https://images.ctfassets.net/662nae7q8cm6/38DaHNDnz0epPreBMr...
That's a signed statement, from the artist, stating that the drawing in question was created in accordance with the instructions.
Does such a certificate have value of its own? It depends on whether somebody is willing to pay for a certificate stating that a particular drawing (which may no longer exist) was created according to the instructions. So, maybe yes, maybe no. I don't know why you think this is important though.
Does a certificate of authenticity make sense in the case of a digital image? No, because we can verify the authenticity ourselves by calculating the MD5 sum of the copy and comparing it to the MD5 sum of the original. We don't need to pay a trusted third party to do that for us, we can do it ourselves for free.
You misinterpret the practical workings there a little bit. The Tate will not need to buy another certificate if they choose to exhibit the drawing once again, by hiring draughtsman to paint it on a wall once more. It doesn't refer to a specific installation. The number of the wall drawing on the certificate refers to the design, not the physical object.
Nevertheless, even with your interpretation, you could ask why a museum would want to pay for an artist to provide this kind of certification.
I'm writing this from Frieze Art Fair. There are a number of video pieces here which you can buy. They'll give you a USB drive. They will pinky swear to only sell one of those, to you. And they'll give you a certificate of authenticity. Its supposed to certify that this isn't just a copy of the video that you made. Which isn't to say that you can't make a copy and give it to your friend. She will own the same bits. But only yours is authentic, because you have that certificate. That is what is meant by authenticity.
It's a system the art world has experimented with for a while. These kinds of certificate-based works don't sell that easily either. Much easier to sell a painting. But it's the same system as an NFT and not more or less scammy than that.
A certificate of authenticity does make absolute sense in the case of physical art (provided that it actually certifies the authenticity of the work, of course), because physical copies are all slightly different. Therefore people may want to tell those that are original, i.e. made by the artist or under their supervision, apart from those that are not. By contrast, there is no such thing as an original copy of some digital information, because a piece of digital information isn't put together by any individual that could claim to be the author of the copy. Even if they could (which they definitely cannot), all copies are identical and impossible to tell apart one from another. Then, what would a certificate of authenticity be certifying exactly? Nothing. It's just a ploy.
A ploy that all actors willingly are signing on to - artists, galleries, and collectors. No one is misunderstanding what is going on. People are selling the certificate on the artificial assumption that it represents the art somehow, but you are buying the piece of paper.
W
> The way The Currency works is that collectors will not be buying the physical artwork immediately. Instead, they will pay $2,000 for the NFT and then have a year to decide whether they want the digital or the physical version. Once the collector selects one, the other will be destroyed.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90657113/damien-hirsts-the-curre...
They agreed that the current manifestation (signed URLs to JPEGs) are scammy, but that is one use of the NFT concept. In gaming, NFTs can represent in-game items with utility and unique attributes that change as you use them. They can be used across multiple games and sold/traded on an open marketplace.
I hear this a lot, but it really makes no sense to me.
An in-game item is really only suited for the game in which it exists. What good is a CoD FN FAL with certain balance, certain damage, certain bullet velocity, certain balance - in Minecraft? Anywhere else really?
Game creators go to extreme lengths to make their games balanced and fun and engaging. Opening up the ability for people to port in legendary weapons from unrelated games seems like the last thing game creators would want, and certainly, it's the last thing I'd want as a player.
Am I missing something? What's the draw?
Then if there's only one source for items, and only one place to use those items, you've got what we call a centralized system. Why would the game creator then want to give away the revenue from such a marketplace to "the blockchain" when they can just do it themselves and have a far more lucrative business model?
I don't think the point is that this is settled and will definitely work, but there are interesting applications for NFTs and games.
More generally, has anyone built an application which accepts, in some nontrivial sense, NFTs generated using another application?
What are the incentives a publisher/developer has for putting anything on a blockchain?
Company B wants nothing to do with Company A's digital assets, and Company A does not want to make transitioning away from their own game easy.
NFTs will never be used in gaming, outside of gimmicks (and all the current attempts talk more about the NFTs instead of any form of actual gameplay.)
This makes no sense. It's like calling the very idea of an Oracle database is a scam. NFT's are basically a consensus-driven shared database, that can be used for legitimate reasons or for scams.
Is the concept of digital ownership a scam?
If so, why?
Digital ownership only works for things that 100% stay in the digital realm, and even then it's not a guarantee.
It's "ownership" of something without granting you any of the perks or rights that usually come with that.
It's not even exclusive ownership - because, while you have exclusive control over your particular token, there is nothing that keeps some other entity from minting another token and declare that it symbolises ownership of the same asset that is symbolized by your own token.
I think NFTs do have some interesting properties. The ownership of the token itself is indeed exclusive - this is enforced through the blockchain. Moreover, token ownership can be verified by software, without any human involvement. This could enable some moderately interesting use-cases, like resellable digital assets: You could imagine an online game where each character is bound to an NFT. You can sell the character by selling the NFT - and the game can restrict access to the character to the current owner of the NFT.
But this doesn't seem to be what's actually done: Instead, NFTs are simply declared to symbolise "ownership" of some real-world asset, without having any kind of actual connection to that asset.
I bequeath to you digital ownership of this string. Let's imagine hn is an immutable forum. It represents a block of gold. What are you going to do with it?
Very probably their primary motivation. I'm pretty sure NFTs will be allowed back in as soon as they figure out a way to skim 20% off of every TX.
Also how is buying an NFT money laundering exactly? Especially if it's done on the blockchain, this seems to be the ultimate in traceability if it's done with ETH, which invariably it will be.
I agree about the monopoly part.
This deal is getting worse all the time!
But it seems to me you just don't like NFTs. Most people who buy them know exactly what all this is about. If NFTs were "deceptive" in some ways (and of course there are always projects with 10K bot followers that aren't legit),then I'd agree with you. But I think for NFT people, it is what it is.