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Comment by s17n | Hacker News Reader

this is addressed in the article:

> he admitted that building this interoperable ecosystem, which he sees as the future of video games overall, doesn’t technically require blockchain technology at all.

> “Blockchain is just the way that it’s going to happen, I think, because there’s a lot of cultural momentum around people equating blockchain with openness and trusting things that are decentralized on the blockchain.”

(actually I think he's understating the case here, representing ownership is a real use case for blockchains)

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But blockchain only has "cultural momentum" because of the lure of profits. Is there an example of a popular blockchain project that isn't based on "early buys can get rich by selling to latecomers"?

I guess the argument boils down to "it's web3 because it has blockchain, and it has blockchain because that's a good marketing buzzword." Which, fair enough, I guess. That could be right.

Blockchain-backed or not, I think it's pretty unlikely that a bunch of competing game companies are going to come up with a system that lets you share items between games. That sounds technically and politically very hard, and for not a lot of benefit.

So basically blockchain is going to coincidentally solve a problem that it's not explicitly needed for? Honestly I can see this happening, but regardless of it being blockchain or a vanilla API it's worthless without everybody (game developers, game publishers, gamers, marketplace owners) agreeing to work on it together. The assets only have value if they're portable, and they're only portable if everybody agrees the assets are valuable enough to spend time/money/infrastructure supporting. It's a very weird chicken-and-egg problem and I think it's a long way from being solved. Part of the reason is because some of the necessary players see a financial incentive not to solve this problem.

My question is: is this even a problem worth trying to solve? How much more will customers pay for a skin that works in multiple games (assuming that's possible)?

> How much more will customers pay for a skin that works in multiple games

The bigger question is to whom will customers pay for a skin that works in multiple games.

If they'll pay to the first game where they bought that skin, then that's a strong incentive for most games to prevent this from working and avoid or disrupt the ecosystem, because they would rather have the player re-buy the same skin on their platform (i.e. "this thing will allow free transfer of skins from A to B" is a property that works against the proposal, not for it)

If they'll pay to every game, then the blockchain solution needs to solve that very difficult problem of revenue allocation between all the stakeholders, ensuring that every company involved feels certain that they'll be able to extract a revenue stream from the process, instead of being permissionless, full ownership of your items, etc.

> My question is: is this even a problem worth trying to solve?

And even if it is, why would we need The Blockchain to solve it?

If his premise is that profit isn't necessary, then without a profit motivation there's no need to "really own" an in-game asset anyway. If I'm not going to sell it, who cares if the same skin works in Fortnite and Roblox because I "really own" it, or because Epic and Roblox Co. linked a database? Web3 is definitionally only about concept of ownership, and ownership doesn't matter if you aren't selling, and doubly doesn't matter with non-scarce infinitely reproducible digital assets.

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