It's entirely probably they'll merge at some point if they haven't already.
Think about what it would actually take to implement such a thing:
- Call of Duty and Battlefield - rival games from rival companies - would need to agree to an integration at a VERY deep level
- They would have to share the same asset formats, such that an asset designed for one game could be used in another
- Issues of balance would have to be resolved: just sharing 3D models wouldn't be enough, they would need to agree on a system for modelling damage, armour piercing capabilities, visual effects...
- Then they would have to add blockchain integration deep enough that weapons a player obtains in the game are represented in a way that the other games can see.
- ... not to mention figure out some kind of exchange rate / add some kind of additional economy to their games, which would need to be shared across different games such that e.g. a pistol in Battlefield wasn't worth the same as a machine gun in Call of Duty
That's just off the top of my head.
And... they're supposed to be games! Game design is about balance - creating a set of rules that players enjoy.
Allowing some cryptocurrency-billionaire to jump into any game they like with the best possible guns and armour doesn't sound any fun at all.
Pretty much every idea I see coming out of this space has the same problem: it sounds plausible in a high-level hand-wavy, but collapses the moment you start to dig into the details of how it would work.
(My absolute favourite bad idea is still real estate on the blockchain, where presumably if I forget my password I can no longer sell my house)
I never went through buying property before so I honestly don't know, but most of the people I know just hired a lawyer and got it done and it was never a thing they had to think about afterward.
I've talked to someone who worked on a (non-NFT-based!) solution for this in developing countries -- it turns out that yes, the cost to bribe officials to falsify documents to steal property can be cheaper than the property's market price.
No?
This already happens partly with asset stores like Unity's https://assetstore.unity.com/, where you can just buy assets to use in your games and multiple developers end up using the same assets. There's nothing preventing "popular NFT asset packs" from being a thing that, on top of helping devs make their games faster, would also end up helping indiedevs attract people to their games, since they'd be implementing certain NFT packs and users who own those would be more likely to check those games out.
Like I said, I think it's a pretty weak idea but it's not that crazy or ridiculous to imagine it happening to some degree.
Further, assets aren't used the same way between games. Just because Game A and Game B use the same weapon asset pack doesn't mean it's fungible between games. Game A might use a damage scale from 0-1000 while Game B is rolling virtual dice with bell curve distributions. Game C uses a sword asset pack but shoots the swords out of a sword shooting bazooka strapped to a unicorn.
If I love Game C with its accurate unicorn physics, I don't care that it uses the same asset pack as Game B that's a D&D workalike.
There's virtually no utility for anyone storing the license of an asset pack on a blockchain. Unity doesn't care if I own a license to a game using an asset pack, they're not going to take on the cost of distributing it to me. Unicorn Bazooka doesn't want to give free advertising to the D&D workalike game by associating with it on a blockchain.
A game engine built such that it can track games made with it that use a specific asset can have a percentage of the game's profits automatically go to the asset creator's wallet. So if you create some set of assets that are used by 500 different games, you're getting a very small percentage of each sale of each of the 500 games and you're being compensated for your work in a way that properly captures each game's success, rather than having each game pay you a flat fee. Wouldn't that be great?
I think people like you, who say that "there's virtually no utility to [new tech]" are just lacking a little imagination.
So it's great that someone making assets can only make a good return if the maker of the game is successful? If an otherwise good asset(s) are used in 500 shitty games that don't sell any copies, the asset creator gets screwed. They have no influence on the quality of the end product, successful marketing, or even whether it's gets completed. That's just working for free unless you get lucky. If that model of pay took off then a lot of people making assets will get boned and a couple will win the lottery.
For a game maker it's not much better of a deal. They get a low/no cost asset during development in promise for a cut of future sales. Now they've got percentages coming off every sale in perpetuity. They can only sell their game at a price the market will bear. If that's a relatively low price all those percentages for assets chip away at their net.
I don't see that model being great for anyone. Outside of lottery winners most participants just get screwed.
> I think people like you, who say that "there's virtually no utility to [new tech]" are just lacking a little imagination.
I might be lacking in imagination. It might also be the wisdom to see a lot of crypto-based ideas are just "solving" problems by introducing different problems.
Selling game assets on a blockchain and paying asset creators is only meaningful if people accept that blockchain's authority. If it falls out of favor/use/legality then it has zero usable value to anyone. I don't see any online stores accepting Beanz or Flooz and I know I've got some Geoffrey dollars somewhere that aren't worth much. I don't see why you think anyone will see any value in a particular blockchain around today.
And all of that hard stuff could be done entirely without blockchain, and would indeed not be made any easier by blockchain, because it's all just tricky gamedev work. Once you've got all that stuff done, you could just use an API or a normal database to transfer "digital assets" between games, and skip the blockchain stuff.
Oh, is making an interoperable API too hard? Well, it's not going to be any easier on the blockchain...
The new things people propose as Web 3 use cases, e.g. interoperable game items, simply aren't practical. That's why they don't exist already — not because they require blockchain to build.
I've heard people argue that big tech social media silos will be replaced by decentralized Web 3 social media, but why would they be? We already have decentralized social media. The reason Mastodon can't compete with Twitter isn't because it needs blockchain; it's because Twitter has all the users and all the money, and that's because centralization is just more profitable. It boils down to economics, not technology.
It’s kinda like McDonalds doing a promotion. If you bring a Burger King packaging you get a free Big Mac.
Poe's law is striking again, can't tell if you're serious or pointing out the flaw in the thinking.
Doesn't that statement show how crazy this is? This never happens in the real world so why would it happen in the virtual world.
Also I'm way behind on this stuff but isn't trading of different things in different contexts the reason we invented money?
Also, it is more likely that a few leaders will emerge in the NFT space offering a framework or platform as a service that is used by rival game development companies. You know, like when you boot up a game and see all of the logos for the frameworks they used.
Im not arguing that this is good. Just saying it is more likely to happen than not.
Going with your analogy, think a bit more carefully: does that guy in the parking lot who sold you a Big Mac receipt have the power to compel Burger King to give you free food? That’s all the power an NFT has — there’s nothing magic about it, just a question about whether the business in question wants to do it. If they do, they don’t need a blockchain. If they don’t, a blockchain can’t make them.
Well yes, allowing to import an NFT is a business decision. Not sure what the point is?
Same thing with other systems. Sony doesn't want their games to run on Xbox, and MS doesn't want theirs to run on Playstation. Why? Because then you wouldn't buy their consoles and they wouldn't get the money from licensing and cuts from their digital stores (you'd be free to choose, if your Xbox broke you could get a Playstation and keep going, breaking their revenue modeL). MS does want games to run on Windows along with their consoles because it keeps developers committing to MS's platform because it's sufficiently hard to migrate to the other consoles or OSes.
Gamers can't stop pre-paying for games which launch with tons of bugs or paying for micro-transactions which incentivize abusive game design. I am highly skeptical that even 0.1% of buyers would not play a game they otherwise wanted because it didn't allow some way to recognize your items from another game.
Problem is that this information should be private.
If I know you are a heavy user of some other game, maybe I can sell you something to advance in the game quickly instead of having to play a lot.
Is it desirable? For a game company, maybe. But for an insurance firm?
I am not so sure.
Uh, yeah... that's integration!
I think this would end in a lawsuit it you do itm
Does the code for cross-checking who holds what NFT on what platform just materialize out of whole cloth? Does Eth not have an SDK?
> and there is no need to have an agreed between both companies
Yeah, you would. The IP rights don't get thrown out just because there exists a pointer in a ledger that says you paid money to do widgety things with the content on someone's platform.
Also, plenty of games use totally different scales for things. +10 to damage might be a huge benefit in one game, but a tiny benefit in another. The NFT could publish a value like "here's what the max value of the stat is in the original game" so other games could make it proportional, but stats might not necessarily have a max value.
Basically it seems like the only reasonable way to do this is for game developers to cooperate in some way, and if cooperation between devs is needed, the value of using a blockchain instead of a database + API goes away.
If the game just trusts any NFT in the right format to be an item, you wouldn't even need to be a crypto billionaire. Minting an NFT costs less than $100 worth of Ethereum according to a quick Google search. Lots of random gamers would pay that much to mint a set of armor that grants + a million percent to damage or whatever.
The only workaround I can see to people minting insanely overpowered NFT items is to only trust NFTs minted by a whitelist of trusted game developers, so you have to actually get the item in a trusted game. But, of course, that completely defeats the purpose of using blockchain. It might as well be a normal API with a database. In fact that would be much more efficient because of the very high costs of publishing data to a public blockchain.
And I'm not some NFT zealot by the way. I just think the way you're presenting that use case is quite a strawman. You're saying the companies have to agree to a bunch of stuff, but they don't, and that's the whole potential imo -- each can pick and choose how and if they want to bring a given NFT in-game.
Walking through your points --
- Rival companies have to agree to integration at a deep level -- they both have to independently decide to support a given NFT type, yes, but they don't have to agree with each other about how it's integrated. For instance, one might allow you to don your armor purely for aesthetics, whereas the other might add some performance advantage for owning it.
- They have to share asset formats -- not true -- the original NFT might point to some image, but each game could simply verify token ownership, and have their own assets representing it. Loot, for instance, is just text on a background. There's a lot of room for creativity in interpreting how those text descriptions might be implemented.
- Issues of balance have to be shared -- not true -- because each game could balance and implement the item the way they choose. And again, the base case could be a pure aesthetic implementation.
- They have to add deep blockchain integration -- I don't follow your point there -- they certainly would have to call the chain to verify NFT ownership, but again, they don't have to agree how to represent the items.
- Exchange rate -- isn't that the point of a public market like OpenSea? The market is already there, bidding and offering every day.
- Billionaires paying to win -- who's to say some games wouldn't invert what you'd expect so that common NFTs can actually keep up alongside rares, or even have advantages over them? Maybe in pitting a mob of commons against the rares, for instance. Again, this introduces more possible choice for players -- if some company today breaks their game mechanics to favor pay to win, you don't have a way to move your existing investment in that game anywhere else. Whereas if frustration grows with some popular NFT game, a competitor could come along with better balance and eat their lunch.
Eventually you'll have a handful of big NFT companies whose entire purpose is to manage the hat economy, because if you throw the door open to any old NFT, you immediately tank the scarcity that keeps it running. But since we have to trust a handful of big NFT companies anyway, they can now just bring the data about who owns which hat in-house and provide an API to every game that wants to interoperate. RIP the blockchain.
Steam Community Market[0] pretty much a long running example of such a system, but it is missing one thing, you can't 'cash out' beyond your Steam wallet to spend on other items that aren't games or other virtual items. I think this is a valuable feature as it prevents the massive speculation on virtual goods that would absolutely ruin the ability to collect/use virtual goods for an economically efficient price.
Without it, I 100% believe artificial scarcity would prevail in search for the maximum value extraction.
Around 2014 I looked, out of curiosity, into Ethereum and its EVM before Ethereum came out. Back then I even ran a node on... a Raspberry Pi (!). If I remember correctly even in 2014/2015, the official Ethereum client/node, written in Go, called "geth", was already using the term "web3" everywhere.
I'm not saying it's good or bad that people are using that term but all I'm saying is Ethereum using the term "web3" predates the "Metaverse" announcement by at least seven years IIRC.
It may be "en vogue" now but credit where it's due: Ethereum was using that term a long time ago already.