Epic says it’s ‘open’ to blockchain games after Steam bans them | Hacker News Reader

Epic says it’s ‘open’ to blockchain games after Steam bans them

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Blockchain is becoming a pain in the ass. Games don't need Blockchain. It serves no purpose other than making some people rich and having the games filled with farmers that will eventually ruin everything.

Are there other, non-currency related, reasons why Blockchain would be used in a game?

Virtual land. You could have a persistent game world with ownership rights and then multiple unrelated games using the public information about who owns what.

Club membership. Similarly multiple unrelated games could verify that a user is a member of an external organisation to grant certain in-game privileges.

Why do you need distributed consensus to do that, though? What's wrong with a database on a server?

Wouldn't it help with the "publisher doesn't want to maintain a server for that old game anymore" situation?

If you don't have a situation where absolutely nobody can be trusted, then all these things become tractable with the traditional cryptography. In games you can choose to trust a game publisher, a server, or a consensus of a few selected parties.

People can prove their identity and ownership of items via a private key. A new server can accept claims signed with a public key of the previous publisher, and you could turn that into a federated system.

If the publisher shuts the servers down, it doesn't matter if a Blockchain days you're the owner of an item.

It matters because it means the community or another publisher can pick up where the original one left and all the data is still there. Or you can build an alternate world and carry users over.

But again you would have to rely on the publisher. And they can simply create a new Blockchain for the game. In the end there's no difference between that and a traditional db.

> It matters because it means the community or another publisher can pick up where the original one left and all the data is still there.

How is it in the interest of the game developer to create such an insurance policy, even if it did work that way?

This. It offers a persistence mechanism for game mechanics where decentralization is of value. Ownership and identity can become immutable, no longer subject to the whim of developers and publishers. If modeled off of open source crypticurrencies , you might also have the benefit of rigorous security and testing. Riffing off of smart contracts like ethereum offers, you could incorporate game mechanics into a ledger, assigning the rules, content, and access features to models designed and distributed within a blockchain.

Second Life and metaverse type enterprises could benefit, but do could any game with sharding and character persistence.

You'd want to incorporate a community sanity check system, to roll back the results of exploits, based on a distributed moderation and management setup that runs on election, delegation, and community consensus. I see this niche as a great playground to experiment with virtual governance, a way to search the space for systems that could enhance real world government.

> Wouldn't it help with the "publisher doesn't want to maintain a server for that old game anymore" situation?

Why would as game publisher want to undercut its own planned obsolescence?

Disclaimer: I don't play a lot of games, and those I do play, I only play the single player campaigns, so I may be completely off and naïve here.

But, from what I've seen, there is no fee for online games. Once you buy the game, you can either not play online or play online, for the same price. There is no "cover charge", so to speak, on top of the original game price.

The publisher could try to unload the burden of the server maintenance to the players, in some sort of decentralized fashion, since running the server doesn't bring in any new money, but it does have a cost.

I'm not sure how the whole "loot boxes" / dlc thing integrates into all this, though I don't see why they wouldn't be able to sell those in a decentralized environment, too.

There are multiple pay to play online games with a monthly fee, especially in the MMORPG sphere.

Others sell loot boxes or cosmetic stuff, even games that cost you money both when buying the game and when renewing your monthly subscription.

A Blockchain wouldn't give them any benefit over what they already have. In fact they would lose control over some stuff while bot farms and criminals would make a lot of money with almost no oversight.

I think the idea is to be able to trade/sell/buy game assets on 3rd party sites. There becomes a distinction between ownership and control. A person could "sell" ownership of an item though they still control it by offering a contract. This contract would be tied to the life of the item and would be shown to any possible in-game player that wanted to take control of the game asset.

The "multiple unrelated games" part. You can have game studios/creators that don't know each other build upon an existing persistent shared world without opening their database/server to the other studios.

> You can have game studios/creators that don't know each other build upon an existing persistent shared world without opening their database/server to the other studios

Why would any game developer want to create that opportunity for their competitors?

The vendor lock in is part of the business strategy after all...

There's no value to a distributed ownership record of things in a game that is centralized anyway.

And even in a partly decentralized game where players can run their own servers, there's no way to force the private servers to respect the distributed ownership records.

" games filled with farmers that will eventually ruin everything"

In fairness, this is hardly a problem unique to them. Bots are an issue in any game that gets big enough and has a black market for in game currency.

Yes, but now it's even worse. It getting out of the gaming sphere into the mainstream.

There seems to be a lot of confusion what this means. There are two main uses for blockchain tech in games at the moment. One is as cryptocurrency for in game transactions, the other is for NFTs.

The issues with cryptocurrency are volatility and that the decentralised structure means nobody is liable if things go wrong. With VBucks for example, the VBuck literally stops with Epic. Crypto is too often seen as a way to monetise without assuming liability.

NFTs are another can of worms. All an NFT does is associate an account with an asset ID on the blockchain. For internet traded artwork this means a string associated with a URL of an artwork belongs to this person and can be traded to someone else. In a game that ID might be associated with a magic sword in an online game. For that to matter, other games would have to recognise that association and honour it so if that customer gets an account with their game, that NFT corresponds with a sword in their game too. It's all still base on trust though. There's no guarantee that a particular NFT would be recognised by any other game, or even a new version of the same game, or be recognised as representing a similar asset.

Basically Steam doesn't want to touch this stuff, because they don't want to be on the hook, either financially or reputation-ally, for any actual or implied guarantees in this area made by games on their platform. Guarantees that nobody, not even the games publishers themselves are in a position to make, due to the inherently decentralised nature of this sort of blockchain tech.

Steam doesn’t want to touch the stuff because they don’t know how they can profit from it. Once they figure that out just wait a few weeks and boom, steam suddenly has their own nft marketplace

There are already profits. They will only do it if they think the business is worth the attendant costs and risks. My guess is they will not touch this because it's never going to be worth it, but I have to say it is possible the money might lure them in. We'll see.

It's purely a PR. Epic needs to take users and mindshare from Steam. If Steam banned eating babies, Epic would announce opening a baby restaurant.

Less than one month ago:

> We aren’t touching NFTs as the whole field is currently tangled up with an intractable mix of scams, interesting decentralized tech foundations, and scams.

[1] https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/144251952287594906...

that's the laugh I needed this morning, thanks

I can't imagine there are even many (if any?) blockchain games where it matters. Are there really so many games blocked on Steam that can now go towards Epic?

The article misquotes Steam’s rules. Here is what Steam says:

> Applications built on blockchain technology that issue or allow exchange of cryptocurrencies or NFTs.

And the article:

> Games that use blockchain technology or let users exchange NFTs or cryptocurrencies won’t be allowed on Steam …

The problem isn’t the blockchain, it’s blockchain-based cryptocurrencies and NFTs.

Granted, I don’t know why you’d use a blockchain in a video game other than cryptocurrency or NFT reasons.

But it’s unfortunate that “blockchain” is apparently synonymous with proof of work cryptocurrencies and NFTs.

> But it’s unfortunate that “blockchain” is apparently synonymous with proof of work cryptocurrencies and NFTs.

I usually put stuff like that down to either lazy writing or just the wrong/badly skilled writer.

It's the same as MSM portraying hackers wearing hoodies!

> it’s unfortunate that “blockchain” is apparently synonymous with proof of work cryptocurrencies and NFTs

What else would it mean?

Supposedly "trustless" consensus systems is what all the "blockchain" hype is about. (And those are only useful for censorship-resistant money. For literally everything else you don't need them and they don't even work.)

If you were to just talk about merkle trees / hash chains or anything else that's literally "chaining blocks"… well that doesn't need a buzzword. That's not new technology.

A blockchain is "just" a fancy hash chain, or a hash chain with rules. Take your pick.

Blockchains provide a cryptographic ordering of events, or cryptographically agreed upon state, which is a useful property. It's certainly not as world-changing as a lot of blockchain-enthusiast-cryptocurrency-bros think, but it's not "only useful for censorship-resistant money."

Which is why I think it's a shame that blockchain has become synonymous with proof of work cryptocurrency scams.

This may be silly question: How are blockchains any different from micro-transaction or drip-dlc? As far as I see all are just way to get my money. (I'm getting old and no longer in the loop.)

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