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Comment by jobigoud | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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...

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