Why crypto gaming is not the future
blakeir.com
blakeir.com
I do see what you are saying about micro transactions though, and about the player's ability to re-capture some of their investment after they are done with the game or ingame item.
As another commenter said this is all perfectly possible without NFTs and blockchains and stuff, it's just nice to get web stores, payment processing, and creator fee percentages on resale all for free with very little coding/cost.
I also had the same experience as a kid playing a tcg in tournaments and losing to adults who were buying 50 packs at a time.
But there's a ton of ways to play these games. Of course, you can always play limited. $10-15 for 4-5 hours of entertainment is a great deal. Get enough cards and you have a cube you can draft whenever.
Until new people stop coming in and the value crashes. Sounds like every other Ponzi scheme.
Yes if no one plays the game the value of cards would crash, just like in real life with YuGiOh. Would you call that a ponzi scheme?
Physical trading cards and NFTs both follow a similar pattern of use, see First-Sale Doctrine[1]. After purchase, you are free to sell, lease, dispose, trade, gift, etc the object (which represents the IP) without having to first gain a license to do so from the copyright holder. With books, trading cards and other physical objects this is written into law. With NFTs there is no law specifying this; but it seems to be the general understanding (and would likely hold up OK in court, based on how these assets are being sold and consumed by the public).
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
A conservative way of investing offered by mom & pop banks where I come from is through funds with capital guarantees (get the return of this portfolio, but at least 95% of what you put in). These are usually created and priced by people with math-heavy PhDs, that's how hard they are to understand. It's safe to say that >99% of investors don't understand them (especially what the exact price for the guarantee is), but they're legitimate regulated products.
NFTs add nothing to this except hype and extra processing power required to mint them. Without the game, the NFTs are worthless; without the NFTs, the game could work exactly the same.
Edit: Also, if the games servers died so would your collection of cards. If for whatever reason the devs killed Gods Unchained someone could build a fork and we'd be able to take our cards over there because the asset is decoupled from the game. Bit of an edge case but in a world where people complain that digital ownership is false (such as ebooks) then it could be a fun solution.
Here by “you”, do you mean the player or the developer? If you mean the former, that’s solvable if implemented in the game (MTGO, diablo 3’s auction house, and how could I forget Artifact). If you mean the latter, I don’t see this as an advantage to me as a player at all. In fact I could argue that having to purchase eth would be an extra hassle to me.
> Also, if the games servers died so would your collection of cards. If for whatever reason the devs killed Gods Unchained someone could build a fork and we'd be able to take our cards over there because the asset is decoupled from the game
I don’t think I’m understanding this right. Is the game open source?
What’s the asset that’s decoupled from the game? The ownership data on the blockchain?
If the game logic is not fork-able as well, I don’t see the value in forking the chain. Your collection will be lost as cards in the sense of gaming cards.
I edited my post because in the paragraph above I compared that to “the Hearthstone team releasing the card art to the players once they shut down the game”, but I’ve since realized that if the fork is about the ownership, the art would also be lost unless it was either released to the public or already public. In any case I can’t see the value in keeping original ownership information about (a copy or instance of) public digital art.
I’m asking in good faith just to be clear.
I meant the developer. I know this tech does exist but Diablo had to build their own auction house, integrate with Stripe, build a store, etc... I never saw MTGO, I just believed it could exist. Any ERC-721 compliant asset can be traded and stored on any NFT marketplace, so you get all of these things for free as long as you write a bit of code for the card. In my eyes the time it takes to get something up to become tradable on Ethereum is similar to getting a blog going on RoR - it can take only minutes. Also become Ethereum trades are atomic transactions it gives us more power than most game stores, for example I could trade my Shiny Pikachu for your Blue-Eyes White Dragon. Not for money, but for other games assets. As part of the same Transaction. Think about a Runescape trade where you have the items on your side and their side - you know if you click accept and they click accept you're going to get each others items. I think that's pretty neat compared to the norm of using third parties to manage the trade, or doing it purely on a trust basis.
> I don’t think I’m understanding this right. Is the game open source?
Parts are open source but not the majority of the game.
> What’s the asset that’s decoupled from the game? The ownership data on the blockchain?
Yeah that's right, the cards themselves.
> If the game logic is not fork-able as well, I don’t see the value in forking the chain. It would be the equivalent to the Hearthstone team releasing the card art to the players once they shut down the game. But your collection will be lost as cards in the sense of gaming cards.
So this is sort of what I meant about forking the game. Because the data for the cards are off of the game you could use the assets themselves to create another version and keep ownership from the original game. I know this is a bit of a crazy idea but it is a possibility due to the decoupling of game and state. This was more in response to someone else who said that this was a Ponzi scheme as if the game servers shut down you'd lose your cards (which I don't agree with anyway, because it's a game - not an investment strategy lol, but I was just thinking about that when I wrote this).
As a strongman: The reason the new developer would do that is community goodwill, and that is a strong argument. The blockchain record of those NFTs is a strong guarantee that the card ownership database is published, so that you can, as a playerbase, import that ownership db later. That same strong guarantee can be accomplished with any Merkle Tree of card ownership transactions, i.e. you could format the card DB in git, and publish it publicly, and achieve the same end result.
I mean you could but there's some intangible value of having original items right? It's why you see those APE NFTs selling a dumb amount of money but all the clones since have failed - it's not just having something, but having an authentic something. In my spare time I volunteer at the Cantor Arts Museum in Stanford and there's a collection of sculptures by Rodin. Originally the rule was that any piece created from his cast was an 'Original' however it flooded the market, so the French government built 8 pieces from his casts after he died and dubbed those the "Original" pieces. You could have one from a different set but the value in the art market is far less. My point is if you flood the market with copies it might not effect the value of the OG cards as you'd expect, much like Gen 4 Pickachu cards don't cost as much as a Gen 1 does.
I appreciate the strongman argument, it's nice to see that take on HN regarding crypto :)
To address it, yes you're right that you could do the exact same thing by building a Merkle Tree of card ownership from the games DB. However, these aren't original assets anymore, but replacements. Technically they'd act the same in the game but they'd be more prone to 'flooded copies'. You'd also have to get the company to agree to do that release, rather than being able to do it as a userbase instead. With trading card games people like to own exclusive cards and I think that attitude can be seen with NFTs today. Hell, even if the game did fail the trading market could still exist (do you think Logan Paul actually plays Pokemon with the cards he buys for 100k+? Maybe, but I didn't play as a kid and don't know many who did!).
No, you can't. No, you won't. Card assets and all the data describing their actual behaviour in the game isn't stored on chain. Because stroing anything on chain is prohibitively expensive. So, if/when devs kill Gods Unchained, all assets will be gone, and you will be left with links to non-existing urls in your NFTs.
Edit: also, as someone else pointed out: those rights to those assets will likely belong to original authors, so you can't do anything with them without clear explicit permission.
I don't think anyone led with anything like that, except someone enjoyed the streamlined process of having their game assets outside the game because of the standardized interface.
Developers like the streamlined aspect of implementation, the immediate global audience instead of requiring 20 different payment processes that change all the time, the ability to completely forego making a user model and user state management and user balance management since its all done by the blockchain nodes and libraries, and the ability to bootstrap a community quickly who do all the evangelizing for them.
The users like the portability, even when acknowledging that they still rely on the developer to not deprecate the assets or dilute the supply in other ways. The users do look for ways and competing projects that reduce the developer's ability to do that by leveraging the same technology different ways.
None of this collectibles and gaming audience is interested in physical objects. This audience was already trading in digital collectibles in games, that just had less portability.
NFTs add the ability to do non-custodial trading. You can trade items for money without needing to first hand them over to some random marketplace.
To be more precise it's like Hearthstone, but with a marketplace running on a centralized Ethereum L2.
1. The game doesn't run on Ethereum. The only web3 part is that the game pulls the info about what cards a player own from an Ethereum rollup. Except from that, it's just a normal online client-server game!
2. Immutable X and Starknet are centralized for now but they should hopefully become properly decentralized soon. All we get at the moment is the ability to trustlessly verify card ownership but not much else.
Why does it always have to involve some kind of passive income. I mean, the concept of online cash is fine, and possibly useful, but again, every single implementation is about creating passive income via "gaming." There are applications for blockchain that could just, you know, use a ledger for other things, like voting for rule changes or upgrades.
How does that work out in practice when the transaction costs are already at that level? $100 sale with $50 of gas fees?
Soon: "California introduces new bill to force company of Gods Unchained to give full health benefits and pay a living wage to its players who make less than $50/week on average"
Artifact as big of a failure as it was also had this.
Honestly I spend more time and less money on Magic Arena than Magic Online. I can everything I want for free and it's actually easier to get specific cards. Wizards loss I guess.
True, and 'play-to-earn' will make it even worse.
We have just seen it with Axie Infinity and it is unsustainable as the author has already explained and makes zero sense to apply this 'play to earn' model in games that already have rampant micro-transactions and loot boxes that are also modelled on casino slot machines.
> But not at all in the way it is doing now. No way. Not everything has to be on-chain. 0x has an off-chain order book for its DEX, but on-chain settlement. The future will have to be a mix of centralised and decentralised.
Yes, since we know that both Bitcoin and Ethereum have both failed in scaling for on-chain applications and have resorted to using off-chain layer-2 systems. But even applying that contraption anywhere further confuses the user to even begin to use it.
At least for Lightning it is somewhat easy for users to use such that it the swapping, transacting is hidden from them; but you can't call it 'Bitcoin'. So both centralised and decentralised as a mix will exist (Lightning), but certainly not for 'play-to-earn'.
Even thinking about applying this layer-2 play-to-earn contraption to games is beyond unnecessary with no advantages whatsoever.
- My take was always 'Anything-to-earn' isn't a game, it's a job. And it's at least as old as WoW grinding farms.
- A technical point: you actually can implement capital controls on a blockchain. Tokens aren't anything that sits in your wallet, they're more like a spreadsheet, and you have a Turing-complete language at your hand to define the rules of how it's modified.
- I don't know Axie Infinity, but I think there were Pokemon/Tamagotchi/MTG-style on-chain games that people played just for fun, before anyone was talking about P2E (I remember the name Crypto Kitties). So it is conceivable to have fun with on-chain games, and if you can sell your game avatars, why not (it's not even uncommon)?
It’s interesting this, that despite being enormously technical and complex topics, it’s almost as if the tendency to be optimistic about them is inversely proportional to general understanding of technology. You don’t hear anyone make a well formulated technical argument as to how all these seemingly impossible things will work. And there is no end to the people handwaving things like the tweet in the article.
Haha, and this is what is being measured?
Honestly, delivery is the biggest fruit in gaming in my eye; the space is over saturated with games no one plays and will be 30% less than it was only weeks after it's release. I saw Xbox started a game streaming service that while a bit on the rough side really proves what is left to innovate outside of hardware since the supply shortages with semiconductors make that nearly impossible.
It's always been my guess that GME would do a digital Gamefly play with the influx of cash they got from the Stonk BS, but so far it's the same monoliths that keep making the biggest moves: Sony and M$.
I think their will be a usecase for microtxs and maybe for EnE encryption, but beyond that this is all ICO/NFT hype looking for a way to perpetuate it's own existence.
People played Sarutobi and other tournmanets because it was a way to battle test technology (specifically LN) while having fun and maybe earn some sats, but even it's most devout believers never thought for a second Sony would upend it's business model for using a token on it's own blockchain for the sake of being 'web3' complaint.
I'd argue not since Seals with clubs has their ever been an actual use-case for gaming, and it used Bitcoin (often misrepresented as crypto) for a reason: they needed to bypass financial censorship.
Some kind of skill game or distributed casino
It turns out that a game where you have to spend money to be successful, and where spending more money makes you more successful, is not a very fun game.
in effect it's just a hashtable of addresses to id's all meaning is derivied from other services
Saving the whole history of the world on a blockchain is also useless and wasteful.
Or hell, you can have fans reverse engineer it, which has already happened quite a few times (most recently with Dark Souls 3 since From Software still hasn't brought back the servers, most likely because they're trying to push players towards Elden Ring).
I suspect it's unlikely and better handled by just using a database and a trusted group but it's the only idea I have been able to come up with.
If you don't verify, the economy gets flooded and value of everything approaches zero - even if it is on the blockchain. If the entity controlling the economy isn't controlling the servers the code is running on, is anti-cheat feasible?
I think there could be a novel game economy pattern could emerge from this that could be compelling (where items are not tied to in-game accomplishments), but I'm skeptical blockchains can mesh with current popular game economies.
The only alternative seems like it would require all of the game logic to be encoded on the blockchain, which would mean killing a monster would cost money (to encode the transaction) - would have to be an extremely compelling game to justify the expense.
Each server could have an allowlist of which servers' cards are playable on their server, so it would allow for a decentralized network of card issuers and a web of trust to determine which cards are valid in which contexts.
(Gameplay doesn't necessarily need to be card-based, could be autonomous entities like soldiers and tanks with a set of buff/modifier cards.)
Actually sounds more like an IPO and "shares" are really NFT's with dividends going to token holders. Could be an interesting model if its all crypto, the volatility is likely the biggest issue then.
(I may be using completely incorrect terms, I'm not an expert on these things but it sounds like a plausible implementation)
Almost all scenarios do end up with “you don’t need crypto/blockchain for that”.
Edit to add: there are many examples of software solutions using tech when there are other tech solutions also viable. This doesn’t negate the possible use of another tech just because something else also does it. See NoSQL for instance.