Comment by astlouis44 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by astlouis44 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Wonder what knuckleheads at Valve signed off on this one. The ability to provide true ownership to players, and the ability to make real income off of your time investment in a game is huge.

I would argue that blockchain will eventually have it's biggest use case in gaming, and every studio/publisher/platform that doesn't get on board with this is going to miss the next big disruption for our industry.

Games like Fortnite and World of Warcraft have shown that in-game currencies can be a big thing. What happens when that isn't centrally controlled by a developer, and is distributed throughout the community?

Steam is effectively saying no to the metaverse with this move, in my opinion. Developers are going to go elsewhere to ship their titles.

On this note, my startup is building a decentralized browser games platform that leverages WebAssembly to enable Unreal Engine developers to export any game to HTML5 at near native performance, and we're currently working on WebGPU support. We welcome all games, including those powered by NFT's and blockchain. We will be expanding the platform to support Unity games in the future as well. In addition to hosting, we provide a complete suite of end-to-end tooling for exporting binaries to the web using advanced compression and an asset streaming system so players can jump into the action quickly and experience desktop quality games right inside their browser of choice.

If you're interested in our platform and tools, you can join our Discord here for more information:

https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8

what do you mean true ownership? the only thing you can truly own on a blockchain is something that is internal to said blockchain. you get absolutely zero protection for things that are external to that blockchain. if you take a game like hearthstone and create nft's for the cards, there is nothing about an nft on the ethereum blockchain(or any blockchain for that matter) that restricts blizzard's ability to take your cards from you, inflate said cards supply, destroy said cards or give said cards to another person even if it violates the state on ethereum. for things external to said blockchain particularly when it comes to centralized products and services it offers no guarantees over what you would get from a centralized database.

There's an interesting social consensus that seems to emerge around provenance and originality of NFT contracts.

Some NFTs are extremely valuable (e.g. Crypto Punks) and attract many clones. The clones may be on the same blockchain and have very similar or even identical art. Or, the clones may reuse the same art but issue tokens on a different blockchain. In all these cases, the social consensus on the value of these clones is approximately $0. It's a weird psychology.

i agree, when it comes to things like cryptopunks consensus is what decides what is authentic and what isn't. i still think they are stupid, but i'm at least sympathetic to the argument of ownership and authenticity. you still own nothing more than what exists on the blockchain though, which is self evident based on the fact that people can make all of these clones.

when it comes to hearthstone blizzard decides. you can have every single nft on the planet, but if blizzard decides you dont get to use those cards in hearthstone you 100 percent absolutely don't get to use those cards in hearthstone.

> when it comes to hearthstone blizzard decides. you can have every single nft on the planet, but if blizzard decides you dont get to use those cards in hearthstone you 100 percent absolutely don't get to use those cards in hearthstone.

NFTs are just as useless. I can sell you the NFT for the original doge Shiba Inu, and I can sell Bill the actual legal rights to use that photograph.

Despite you owning the NFT, you can't actually use that photograph. Bill can. And he can sue you, and win, if you try to.

All that ownership of the NFT entitles you to is... Ownership of the NFT. It's like owning a photograph of the deed to my house. It doesn't mean that you actually own my house. You can keep reselling that photograph, but it's not going to get you any closer to owning the house.

But eh, we can burn a lot of electricity to certify that you do, in fact, own that particular photograph of the deed. Fantastic. Meanwhile, I can take, and sell more photographs...

I think this why there is an increasing trend towards valuing NFTs which assign rights to the NFT owners or simply license the whole project as CC0. That removes the dichotomy between on-chain ownership and legal ownership and leaves only a socially constructed notion of digital property and value.

The idea in blockchain gaming is that the NFT is the in-game item. An NFT would represent that powerful weapon, not the picture of the weapon, and the game would look at the blockchain to understand what items you own. The game can use any image it wants to represent that item, and other games may choose to display them differently. If I sell the NFT to someone, I no longer have access to that item in any game but the buyer does.

In this situation, the NFT does come with usage rights (like a license) and isn’t the same as selling a picture of your house.

There's no point to doing any of this when the game could just keep track of this in a traditional database.

The only benefit is having a 'public' API for ownership of an item that other, third-party games could use, but why, as a game developer, would you possibly give any rando third-party competitor full access to this information? It makes sense if you are curating a community of fan-made tooling that ends up promoting your game, but it makes zero sense to give competitors access to it.

Imagine a Hearthstone-clone that pitches it as: "Join our game! You have every card that you own in Hearthstone! And a <gimmick>."

Do you think it would be in Blizzard's interest for that clone to exist? Do you think it would be in Blizzard's interest to go out of its way to turn its player's cards into NFTs, so that some unlicensed Martian knock-off goes ahead and makes that pitch?

It is in Blizzard's interest to share this information with someone that they have a partnership with (or with another game that they've developed), but that problem can be solved by... An API. With revocable keys.

I think that you have very succinctly captured the difference between web2 and web3 ideologies.

Value is socially constructed.

> the ability to make real income off of your time investment in a game is huge.

RMT (real money trading) ruins games, most MMOs ban people for this. It encourages botting and devalues the in-game currency making it hard to play/enjoy the in-game activities because the rewards are so low compared to what paying a RMT seller $1 could give you

as someone who has played magic the gathering for over a decade the secondary market is easily the worst part about the game. needing to worry about a card you spent 100 dollars on getting banned and dropping to 10 dollars over night or needing to make speculative pick ups in an attempt to save money sucks. like a LOT. I just want to play a game, not be a speculative asset day trader.

if the game is so boring that youd rather pay $1 to skip an activity, its a Skinner box

blame the game mechanics, not the money

I am going to disagree and I suspect making money in the sense you are talking about will be globally banned over time. Any time real money is attached to a in-game currency it is a massive failure and ends up devolving into a scam/fraud situation. WoW filled with auction house farmers, Diablo 3 same thing, Fortnite is just a money printer for Epic and that's it.

Not only that crypto is already littered with scams and fraud. As soon as you start hooking up "central" nonsense to it, it will just amplify it.

Making money will be banned globally? We banning capitalism, now?

There is nothing different about a user purchasing a digital asset on the speculation that it's price will increase than on rare coins, stamps, trading cards, race horses, real estate, pork bellies, etc.

There is a difference in someone collecting some stamps or cards and then reselling them later in live. And someone hooking a ipad game to a crypto coin which can be directly exchanged to USD.

One is a casual thing people do and another directly links you playing a game to generating income. You farming your virtual garden for gems every 15 mins which can be translated to USD over time is a impact on society, and not a positive one. Random guy collecting stamps on their spare time is not. And once that happens you'll have people playing 24 hours and setting up all kinds of scams. At some point politicians will get involved and treat it as a threat, thereby banning it. It's a hypothesis and nothing more, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happened.

> There is a difference in someone collecting some stamps or cards and then reselling them later in live. And someone hooking a ipad game to a crypto coin which can be directly exchanged to USD

No, there isn't. Both are free market activities that are arguably arbitrary, but entirely within the realm of human hobbies and curiosities that sometimes yield profits for the participants.

> You farming your virtual garden for gems every 15 mins which can be translated to USD over time is a impact on society, and not a positive one.

It's entertainment value that is produced, and who are you to be the judge of what is positive or negative? It is entirely arrogant to declare for others what is positive or negative for society.

I grew up hearing the same thing about video games. Waste of time for kids, them being a dangerous exposure to violence, etc. etc. But meanwhile parents were wasting their lives away watching television because that was the thing for that generation. Games to me, were far more engaging and interesting and most importantly, interactive. And that interest in gaming eventually led me to become a software engineer, which has afforded me a very nice lifestyle and given me very solid job security. If I had watched television instead of venturing into the world of technology, I'd be worse off.

Later on in life, as an adult, I still play games. I sometimes spend significant sums of money on them, because they still provide enjoyment to me. Sometimes, I'll even spend a couple hundred bucks on a single game, because I want some cool thing in the game and that provides me joy. That is perfectly ok.

The fact that NFTs provide an interface for interconnecting these in-game items and making it easy to create ecosystems for things like creative character models or environments or mod experiences, is not subtractive in the least. It provides an outlet for creativity and a market for art and entertainment. And it does so in a way that does not enshrine or reinforce existing monopoly marketplaces, which are exploitative to the highest degree for both users and creative producers.

> and the ability to make real income off of your time investment in a game is huge

I'll bite. What value-added services are gamers providing to justify an income?

Keep in mind I considering entertainment like streaming value-added to gaming.

The other thing to note is that gold farming and selling accounts is already a job so it’s actually nothing new.

Is that what's happening though? Are gamers grinding NFTs for whales, or something like that?

Err, no. People work for companies farming assets, xp and so on in a variety of games and then sell the accounts on the grey market. For normal games. In the NFT space Axie Infinity has a very similar model and similarly targets people in poorer countries with a pay to earn model although their currency was collapsing last I looked. Although it’s intentional rather than something games companies want to avoid it’s not actually mechanically that different.

gold farming is against the TOS and a bannable offense in many games though.

Yup, which doesn’t stop people doing it nor does it stop people doing it as a job.

Moat owners be defending them moats. They're so much more well established they can change their positions in a few years if need be or absorb them. Boring for sure but expecting the app store of games to follow almost-not-developed speculative stuff is a bit optimistic. In 10 years of course you'll have them in steam store that's a given but in the space until then I fully expect 99% of them to lose 99% of value or more.

If you’re serious about your project, you should set up a website or something outside a discord server. I hate cluttering my discord with all these projects and games that insist you join their discord to “learn more”

There is a website, and it's here - https://digiplaygaming.com/, but it really doesn't contain any worthwhile information. "We'll host your web game" - okay? But I was doing that back in 2009 when I first sold a license to my first commercial flash game. It's not hard to embed a game in an HTML document. Clearly NFT's and crypto stuff feature somewhere in there but it's not spelled out, and because it's not spelled out I'm instantly 100% suspicious.

Yeah looking over the site I guess I understand why the discord was linked instead. They may or may not have killer ideas/tech, but the website fails to explain how it’s much different than the flash game sites of yesterday.

Edit: So I was planning on adding an edit with my thoughts after viewing the correct website, but my points mostly still stand and now I’m confused because both sites are like 70% the same..

Want a demo?

Actually no, that is not our website. This is our website:

https://www.theimmersiveweb.com/

As someone that has most of my value in crypto, a life long gamer and programmer: a 2 fps version of the first halo doesn't really sell it sorry.

You should update your Twitter to point to your new website? Its pretty much identical to your old website, so perhaps it doesn't matter at all.

I see the insanity of replacing forums with discord is really catching on now. Maybe people do want to be constantly distracted and unable to search for organised information?

I think it happens because of reddit. A subreddit sucks compared to a forum, yet it's close enough that separate sites have an extremely hard time getting users due to friction. A discord is different enough that reddit isn't a substitute and most people already have accounts, while providing what reddit lacks the most - personal identity and human relationships.

I agree with all that, the issue for me is when I simply what to peruse info and am forced to join their community. An annoying case for me was a game dev that only posted parch notes in their discord as opposed to a dev blog or something.

I think for me a lot of the pains would be solved if discord allowed a guest mode to temporarily view a server without the (admittedly small) hassle of having to leave the server

You should see some of the highly automated, well-organized, well-run discords out there. It's pretty eye-opening and takes some getting used to, coming from a forum-centric world.

They’re different use cases. Maybe you replace your IRC or your slack with discord, but forums are a totally different thing.

Exactly, yet here we are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com