Hacker News Reader

Comment by exdsq | Hacker News Reader

I’ve had quite a bit of fun playing Gods Unchained which is like Hearthstone but on Ethereum. What does that actually mean? The cards are NFTs so you can buy and sell them. You can also buy card packs with regular micropayments like other TCGs. However because you can sell cards it suddenly becomes a lot more interesting - you can make real money from your legendaries. Not much but I heard earlier in the year people were making $50 a week. The market for high value cards is driven by people wanting to get win streaks for more packs to unlock rare cards to sell, people buy packs from the store because it’s a TCG and that money is in the ecosystem to invest in new card designs/run tournaments/etc… it genuinely works quite nicely and I’m against microtransactions in general because you can get it back out again.

View on HN

I always thought that this was the worst aspect of TCGs! People complain about "pay to win" business models in PC games, but it's 100x worse in dead-tree games. Maybe you spend a few bucks here and there on some kind of premium subscription, whatever, things cost money. But having to physically buy cards always really sucked, especially as a young person without a lot of money, and it was one thing that kept me away from getting more into games like Magic: The Gathering. There was some thrill in collecting, sure, but I would rather have the collecting be an optional side activity, not an essential part of the game.

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.

Yeah TCG's get really expensive. Not as bad as Warhammer, but definitely up there! My only real point is that it's a use case where I'm going to probably buy packs anyway, but now I can buy specific cards & sell cards I get that I don't want to recoup some money. I think I'm actually $7 positive which is pretty weird, I don't know any other game I've played before where I'm cashflow positive.

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.

The reason you're positive, probably, is that the marketplace is P2P and you're getting fair value when you sell, rather than the typical "Sell to a gaming store at a discount". YMMV.

Or I get a pack of cards I don't want and my only option is to "convert them to dust" or whatever the game allows. At least here I can sell them to the community in case someone else wants one!

100% agree w/ this. Started playing Hearthstone years ago. I like getting cool cards but would rather that be a fun/collecting part and not tied to winning the actual game.

Having played the game at a somewhat high level it definitely feels pay to win adjacent at minimum. There are websites out there where you can see estimates of an opponent's deck cost and it's disheartening losing to multi thousand $ decks.

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.

TCGs being expensive is overblown. Certain formats might be, I think this is expected when the prize pool for official tournaments can be $250k... Just like pro level whatevers need to spend big bucks on training or gear, part of the reason most of these cards cost money is because they can make money.

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.

"I’ve had quite a bit of fun playing Gods Unchained which is like Hearthstone but on Ethereum."

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.

Artifact (Steam's DotA CCG) had this at launch, it just uses Steam's marketplace. The game itself didn't do very well but the trading aspect was really seamless.

Cool! Yeah I'm not saying this is blockchain exclusive, but it is nice to get all the components to do this for relatively cheap (and with additional perks like no Steam fees, creator payments on resell, etc).

> Not much but I heard earlier in the year people were making $50 a week.

How does that work out in practice when the transaction costs are already at that level? $100 sale with $50 of gas fees?

Yeah tx fees on Eth suck. Some chains are better, PoS might improve it, but yeah. This is on a Layer 2 chain that has lower fees which helps.

>Not much but I heard earlier in the year people were making $50 a week.

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.

I just like the idea you can join a game, play it, collect some cool stuff, and sell your assets at the end to recoup some of your expenditure when you're done. Also nowadays people are trying to earn money by streaming or competitive playing - I found it novel that they built an ecosystem that can pay out from the game itself without these extra layers on-top.

None of that requires NFTs. As I understand it, Magic: The Gathering Online allowed real-money sales of cards to other players years ago. In fact, "Mt Gox," now best-known for its Bitcoin connections, was originally the MTG Online Exchange.

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.

You're right that this could be done without NFTs, for sure! You could have them as digital assets within the game, like MTG: Online, and trade them. The main benefit of using a blockchain is that you don't have to build a store and manage payment processing yourself.

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.

Most platforms already provide the store and payments processing for you. iOS, PS store, Steam etc And they have orders of magnitude mmore consumers with their credit cards set up than people who use MetaMask or whatever

Just a slight nitpick and an area I would like to see developers improve and communities scrutinize more: are you sure that the NFT images and metadata are stored in a way that would perservere? Like on IPFS or Arweave? I've seen many NFTs actually store everything on the project's own domain! What does getImageUri() return?

> The main benefit of using a blockchain is that you don't have to build a store and manage payment processing yourself

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.

> Here by “you”, do you mean the player or the developer?

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).

Why would someone writing a fork of Gods Unchained (or any Crypto/NFT game) port ownership of cards? If they did, why would they not then flood the market with their own copies of those cards, or power-creep the original cards into irrelevance?

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.

> Why would someone writing a fork of Gods Unchained (or any Crypto/NFT game) port ownership of cards? If they did, why would they not then flood the market with their own copies of those cards, or power-creep the original cards into irrelevance?

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.

Why are you looking for a reason that requires NFTs?

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.

Mt Gox required you to deposit your cards there in order to trade them, and we all know what happened to Mt Gox.

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.

> it genuinely works quite nicely and I’m against microtransactions in general because you can get it back out again.

Until new people stop coming in and the value crashes. Sounds like every other Ponzi scheme.

How’s it a Ponzi scheme? I’m playing a video game I enjoy and would maybe spend money on anyway. Just so happens I can buy cards directly from people like an IRL trading card game, and microtransactions feel slightly less wasteful than in other games where you can only sell them back to the game for dust when you can sell them for cash to others.

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?

In physical card games you can use proxies (fake or invented cards). And if they stop selling the game, you own a physical object so you can keep teaching friends and playing with them like any other tabletop game.

Sure! So if this was a regular digital game you'd be screwed because the assets are tied to the game. As an NFT they're tied to the account, so you could actually make your own game use those assets and keep playing with them :) So that's closer to a physical card than an online-only game like MTG or Hearthstone?

NFTs don't actually give you a license to use the assets unless the person who made them licensed them that way which AFAIK is quite uncommon.

Same with physical trading cards; buying a MtG card does not give you license to copy the card and redistribute it or repurpose it for your own MtG game business (it will count as copyright infringement, even if the publisher has shut the original game down, they still own the intellectual property).

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...

Well, on-chain games might not get us back to this as much as people think, but they're definitely closer to it than 'normal' online games.

Anything related to finance (whether legitimate or not) that people don't understand is either money laundering or a ponzi scheme. There should really be an internet rule which formalizes this.

Wish I could downvote this. How many people even understand how compound interest on their bank account works?

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.

You misread their comment. I think he's saying that people are quick to call anything new that they don't understand, related to finance, a ponzi/pyramid scheme. They aren't arguing that everything in finance is a scam

I am still totally lost to how what I said could constitute a Ponzi scheme

> Not much but I heard earlier in the year people were making $50 a week.

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"

Haha, having moved to Palo Alto last year I think you might be 100% right there.

I was doing this a decade ago in Magic online...

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com