What Happens When Twelve Thousand Game Developers Converge?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
There is near zero overlap between NFT stuff and 3D virtual worlds that actually work and have users. Despite all the PR about Decentraland, few people go there. Here's the current user count, from the live servers. Total is at the lower left.[1] 1222 connected users right now. That's all. (The only trustable number is connected users right now, because that's checkable from outside.) Biggest user count I've seen is 2600, a few months back. The trend seems to be downward. Decentraland claims large numbers of monthly active users, but those numbers may be fake. If you don't connect with a wallet, you get a new identity on each login.
I've been disappointed. I want to see big virtual worlds, like a bigger, better version of Second Life. We are not seeing much implementation from the NFT crowd. At best they bash something together with Unity that looks like My First Unity Game. At worst, they just sell NFT "land" and claim they'll have a 3D world someday.
[1] https://decentraland.github.io/catalyst-monitor/
[2] https://restofworld.org/2022/investors-land-metaverse-decent...
Investigating Three Indie Superstars Accused of Emotional Abuse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDPzZkx0cPs
>What began as an investigation into the collapse of a single indie studio became something much bigger, as more and more developers came forwards to share their stories.
Good thing all of San Francisco moved to Miami where this is commonplace right next to the mayor himself chatting about tech. SF never asked the performers what they thought about being excluded, many of which are just as excited to be at the company event and have that on their resume, instead SF tech crowd barreled towards privileging one group of people over another in hilarious foreshadowing of much greater exclusion.
This description of the GDC trade show floor reminds me of a scene from Ari Folman's film "The Congress" (2013), when the personality stock traders were all freaking out:
THE CONGRESS clip1- Miramount Nagasaki Lobby:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPGhw4nACfk
A much more realistic scene from that same film, which says a lot about the game and entertainment industry:
The Congress (2013) Scan Scene
What has crypto got to do with game development?
You mean promising that some day other people will pay you for playing an un-fun game instead of actually making a fun playable game in the first place.
It's a benefit for players to be able to earn coins ingame and exchange them with other currencies.
The current status quo is you can only buy virtual currency in games, not sell them.
Crypto in game gives more power to users.
(I've heard that NFTs will make assets "transferable" between games, which I also understand to be currently possible when the games cooperate. I've yet to receive an explanation for how NFTs solve the NxM "graph" problem of sharing an asset across random games that don't share the same engine, network protocols, or basic asset formats.)
Of course, it still doesn't work when you lose the license to the asset.
https://kotaku.com/f1-formula-1-one-delta-time-nft-crypto-cu...
Just roll with it, start referring to any random online world as a metaverse (or better yet, the singular metaverse) and move on. Its not about solutions its about capital, the technology comes with some interesting things. I dont view that as controversial. If people want to spend their money on that, sell that.
https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/accounting-for-saas-and-sw...
People that self-identify as gamers are just a gatekeeping irrelevant subsection of the gaming market. They protested “don't you all have phones” while the actual company accurately knew they were making revenue from mobile users who would practically never be at the gaming conference or see the memes. Lootboxes are in, microtransactions are in, presales are in…. you really think all this protesting over NFT’s is going to make them … not in? They’re the same things, an extension of the same trends.
(If you haven't seen these parts of the NFT market yet and have a different conception of NFTs, the above parts have been the biggest parts of the NFT space for the last year)
The reactions from the broader gaming community has been nothing but pure hatred.
PayPal and Stripe do not allow virtual currencies due to them being high risk of chargebacks / credit card fraud.
Crypto is sometimes the only way to accept payment for virtual currencies / ingame items.
It's nice for the developers as chargebacks are very common in the industry and expensive.
Generally you get a bonus % when you pay in crypto because of this.
You could even do away with the redundant virtual currency and embed a crypto currency directly into your game, linking your games natural economy that forms to your coin value.
A game like an MMO usually get's a natural economy driven by supply and demand. Depending on how long it takes to farm gold, how rare the item is, etc.
Using a crypto coin in your game would visualize that value and allow your players to earn it in game and exchange it for its value in Bitcoin for example.
Items would be NFTs, the rarity and attributes of the item is already there, just make a token for it. When players trade items the NFT is transferred from one character (wallet) to another. The value of the item/NFT is what people assign to it.
Items and virtual currencies are just NFTs and tokens that aren't on the blockchain. By moving them to a blockchain you allow them to be exchanged.
So why use crypto, when games already use fonts, and numeric digits, commas, and dollar signs, and string formatting functions, and binary to decimal conversion routines, and text rendering libraries, all existing technologies for visualizing value?
Let's say you have an MMO and players are selling gold for $5 per 10k. The people selling the gold are essentially creating an exchange of a virtual currency for fiat currency.
Crypto cuts that middleman out and allows everyone to exchange to and from the gold with other coins.
The visualization is instead of seeing 3rd party gold sellers giving an estimate of how much your gold is worth, your coin is the direct value.
Did that clear things up?
So why use crypto instead?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/02/26/valves-gab...
>Valve's Gabe Newell Takes A Flamethrower To The Metaverse And NFTs
[...]
>"The things that were being done were super sketchy. And there was some illegal shit that was going on behind the scenes, and you're just like, yeah, this is bad. Blockchains as a technology are a great technology, that the ways in which has been utilized are currently are all pretty sketchy. And you sort of want to stay away from that…. The people who are currently active in that space are not usually good actors."
>"There's a bunch of get rich quick schemes around metaverse. Most of the people who are talking about metaverse have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. And they've apparently never played an MMO. They're like, 'Oh, you'll have this customizable avatar.' And it's like, well... go into La Noscea in Final Fantasy 14 and tell me that this isn't a solved problem from a decade ago, not some fabulous thing that you're, you know, inventing."
>Here, Newell is saying plainly what many in the gaming community have been thinking when it comes to the “metaverse” presented as a bunch of blockchain-based Second Life knockoffs that are selling virtual real-estate to stupid business brands for millions. Meanwhile, actual metaverses, immersive video games, have been around for decades and already do all the things and much, much more than these newcomers.
>Very few people in this space will speak this frankly about the current gold rush situation when it comes to the blockchain, NFTs and the metaverse, but it’s great to hear from industry icon Gabe here to set the record straight.
[...]
Edit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linden_Dollar
Gabe's point stands that the web3 kids have no fucking clue about what came before and has already been around for decades, or what any actual game developer or player would want to do with a game.
It is not economically practical or even technically possible to deliver on most of the empty starry-eyed promises being slung around by NFT shills. They're primarily scammers pushing get-rich-quick pyramid schemes and pump-and-dump rug-pulls, not experienced game developers or designers or economists.
pewpew hit the nail on the head:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30975029
>Crypto is a solution looking for a problem to solve. It is like a parasite, which will latch onto any existing tech and enable scams on the same.
But the balances and asset ownership is stored in a blockchain so you can exchange it with other crypto currencies.
That means you could farm gold ingame, exchange with bitcoin, then go to a bitcoin atm and get cash or vice-versa.
You either buy the whole account or you buy it and then they send you the gold/item ingame.
There's a lot of communities, forums, and even businesses that revolve around it. It's a huge market.
Many games it's not technically banned, just not supported due to payment processors not allowing it.
Some games it may be against the rules, but it's hard to enforce.
There's hundreds of sites like that, some for niche games, some more general.
1) Games can have online features without having to rely on centralized servers. It's an increasing shame that many games which have rich online options end up becoming crippled, if not killed, once the servers inevitably are taken offline. "Crypto" can solve this problem in some cases by being able to decentralize certain types of online features.
2) The decentralization aspect can enable various features to be used independent of a single game. Of course the same is also true of a single server but then you're in an even worse scenario with the servers going offline issue where a single server going down could end up killing multiple dependent titles. As well, with a decentralized solution, competing companies that may not want to depend on one another but might want to share in-game content could do so.
Dragon's Dogma, which was full of relatively innovative features, has at least 2 great use case scenarios. In the game players can use your character as an NPC ally within their game, a 'pawn'. With crypto you could create a decentralized cache of these pawns with the usual benefits: they can theoretically be used in games besides just DD, the pawn system keeps working long after Capcom kills the servers.
Another example was the final optional boss. No individual player can kill it, instead it has a shared hp pool that players chip away at until it dies and each player that contributed is then rewarded. Again a perfect example of something that could be done in a decentralized way that has some possibility of even doing things like having the same boss in multiple games, and of course also working even once the servers are taken offline.
Basically it's just another tool that you can do neat things with.
The previous two were cancelled. (There was a "virtual conference" in 2021 which was rather useless. You could watch videos of talks, basically, while paying far too much. You'd expect that a virtual GDC would be a full 3D environment, but no.) This year, most of the big companies, including Epic, Sony, and Microsoft, cancelled.
Society has splintered in half, with the at-risk along with those who can’t afford to live separately, and everyone else.
People spent the last 24 months segregating after initially combining. Unlike before there is no need to even consider how it spreads from an individuals behavior anymore. We had a unique brief period of history where we actually helped the immunocompromised and other at risk populations live, and then simply reverted to the mean. At risk populations never had that consideration before and now dont have it after, and we learned how to manage. The rest of us will slowly and periodically move to being an at risk population - there are always opportunistic infections - and thats good enough for our emergency services capacity.