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Comment by mark242 | Hacker News Reader

You look at the biggest games of the year: God of War, Elden Ring, Stray, etc. Shoehorning in NFT-style assets into these games is just a ridiculous proposal, especially ones with any kind of "marketplace" that you would have to support. All of the time and effort and maintenance and customer service, all of that would hit the bottom line of the game. The better studios -- that is, the ones who make game-of-the-year candidates -- just won't bother when they can be spending their finite development time on the game itself.

And the idea that they'd buy into a cross-game shared-asset economy is just ludicrous and is a fundamental misunderstanding of P&L at a studio level. There is absolutely zero chance of, say, EA and Activision collaborating on a spec to share assets across brands. Zero, no matter how much you could spin it to executives. "So a BF player could use COD skins?" would get you laughed out of your pitch.

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> There is absolutely zero chance of, say, EA and Activision collaborating on a spec to share assets across brands. Zero, no matter how much you could spin it to executives.

We're seeing the startup mentality being applied to generate these new markets within gaming and people just aren't buying it. It's such an intellectually dishonest argument to make that players want to be able to share assets across games as you point out, yet we're seeing these highly-respected tech leaders try to convince us that such a brain-dead idea is visionary. Why? Because they stand to make another fortune on it and they have absolutely no problem lying to our faces about it.

And the closely related concept of being able to transfer functional game items between games, or sell them on the open market, is even more ridiculous. Not only is it completely incompatible with any concept of game balance, but it's really just a roundabout way of saying that every game should be pay-to-win (by buying items outside the game) -- which is a mechanic which most gamers hate.

It's technologically impossible and also straight up makes no sense if you think about it for longer than a second.

Call of Duty should implement all the various potions from World of Warcraft? What does a Mario Kart powerup do in your Halo game?

I'm trying to envision the pitch to, for example, Fromsoftware, makers of Elden Ring. Ignore the cross-game component for a second because that's mind-bogglingly dumb.

"You could have artificial scarcity of Rivers of Blood*! Imagine that only 1000 people could own it, and could auction it off, and you'd make a percentage of every single transaction! You'd have a brand new monetary stream in-game!"

Alright. Now try to wrap your head around a scenario in which, for a primarily single-player game, people wouldn't completely excoriate Fromsoftware for doing that. It breaks the story. It breaks the sense of achievement in-game. It breaks even the loose sense of community that the game has. It breaks the fundamental nature of the game itself, which is "you have the freedom to build your character how you want as long as you git gud**".

I just don't see the value added at all. There's zero point to it. There used to be games that allowed you to import your characters from older games in the series, for example Ultima. That was interesting for a minute as a bit of a novelty, but that quickly died off because it turns out that people really just want to start out at zero and work their way up. The idea of paying for it is just wildly crazy.

* note to reader: massively overpowered weapon that you get later in the game which takes your character to a completely other level.

** learn the game mechanics, enemies, strengths/weaknesses of weapons, armor, etc. An artificially scarce weapon would never get used.

When I read Rivers of Blood I thought people started owning a location that is necessary to progress through the story and that there would be an overpowered NPC trying to commit highway robbery.

I like these game based experiments of adding real economic elements into a game and seeing exactly where and why it is going wrong because games haven't been politicized to death with partisan interest groups defending their ideology. No, most developers are focused on providing good entertainment and a lot of real world business practices are openly hostile to enjoying yourself which is exactly how many feel about the real world economy but any discussion about improving it will then be thrown into one of the left right baskets, people are more concerned whether something could be called communism or socialism or not than if it is an effective policy that helps both the country and the people.

> It's technologically impossible and also straight up makes no sense if you think about it for longer than a second.

Oh, it's possible, with significant limitations. It would just be such a huge pain in the ass that no one is going to do it, except for cryptobros trying to con people into playing their own awful games.

You don't have to do so. You could make them just show up as a png in some menu. Or just not show up in the game at all. There is value in having cross game resources. Take for example a collection of racing simulators which you can import a car to drive around against AI. You could have a standard for staring a model for the car and stats about it that games should use to customize the experience of using it.

Why would I buy something that just shows up as a png in some menu?

Why would I accept a car bought in some other game as a developer trying to make money?

How would that even work? Need for speed and Forza for example have dramatically different driving models. Does sharing stats between those even make sense?

What about licensing deals? Money exchanges hands when real life brands are used in games. Not sure they'd be thrilled about some random other game using it all of a sudden.

>Why would I buy something that just shows up as a png in some menu?

Because in the game it's for it actually does something.

>How would that even work?

They would need to come up with some kind of standard.

>Need for speed and Forza for example have dramatically different driving models.

You would want to standardize on one to try and keep things consistent.

>Does sharing stats between those even make sense?

Having the car you paid for be separate from the simulator you use to drive it makes sense.

>What about licensing deals?

Whoever is selling you the car NFT would license it instead of the game.

You do realise how impossible all of that is, right?

Technically, no, but in reality, it's never going to happen.

I'm not sure what you mean. Nothing I stated was that farfetched. I'm sure you could even whip together something that fulfills what I'm talking about in a weekend using an existing driving simulator + models that are freely licensed.

> They would need to come up with some kind of standard.

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates game studios.

If you want users to easily add UGC there needs to be some sort of standard. The ability to have your new game instantly have access to a giant catalog of compatible things is useful for game studios. Imagine if each social media site had their own proprietary way you had to encode your images in their sdk before you can upload them.

> The ability to have your new game instantly have access to a giant catalog of compatible things is useful for game studios.

Again - you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what drives game development. It is neither useful nor desirable for a studio to immediately have to work through balance issues in a game before they have even written one line of code. Think about this for half a second. You don't get to wave your arms and just magically get a functioning, workable in-game economy. There is a huge amount of real world capital and human overhead to make sure this magical spec of yours doesn't completely wreck people's enjoyment of playing, which is, you know, the entire point of a game.

The moment that people recognize "oh, I can get a +1% health bump by going into game X and doing some mundane task, then go into game Y where a 1% health bump is the difference between winning and losing a PVP battle" guess what's going to happen over and over and over and over again. You are talking about a fractal amount of complexity for a game designer, developer, product manager, design team, the list just goes on and on. Nobody who wanted their game to be successful would ever latch onto this.

You are projecting. I've never suggested anything close to every game item works with any game. If you go up to my first post in this chain you will see that I say that they even need to show up in the game.

Later in the chain I explained how it would be possible for their to be items which could be shared between many games and the appeal for doing so.

>make sure this magical spec of yours doesn't completely wreck people's enjoyment of playing

In an open more simulator single player game there wouldn't be that much of an issue. If someone has a car that goes 1000 mph then that's what they get. As a game designer your physics system way not be able to handle that or for multiplayer the balance wouldn't work. This can be solved by putting limits on the stats.

I say that they don't even need to show up in the game

> yet we're seeing these highly-respected tech leaders try to convince us that such a brain-dead idea is visionary. Why? Because they stand to make another fortune on it and they have absolutely no problem lying to our faces about it.

They are clearly wrong, but I think much of the time they aren't lying so much as ignorant.

They aren't gamers, and the logic makes sense to them but they are missing the details that actual gamers care about.

"What do I care about? Making money. It's the focus of my life. Therefore everyone else cares about that too. We should inject external economic motives into games, they're totally gonna eat this up!"

>"What do I care about? Making money. It's the focus of my life.

You should've listened then:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18183102#18184642

In case you didn't understand the content of my post there, it wasn't about me. I note that chainlink is still not "the next bitcoin or ethereum", and frankly I wouldn't care if it was.

Not to mention the technical issues involved in having a truly cross-platform asset. What's the poly and texture count? How is scale represented? Collision volumes? How does it render properly? What file formats do we standardize on?

The whole thing is ridiculous. The cynical view would be that this is trying to quickly get retail gamers/"investors" to subsidize VC returns, before the crypto market fully tanks.

Plus they are nuking their own skin revenue to support some other game's, total nonsense

I think much more likely is the items would be created for each game and you'd just gain access to them.

Otherwise yeah, it'd be an absolute nightmare, like you said.

I don't think even the Crypto VCs are approaching this from the angle of making a compelling video game. They don't need to. This is all about creating the next platform for ingame digital consumerism. Think Genshin impact rather than any GoTY title.

And the unfortunate thing (for them that is), is that they haven't even figured out how do to that yet. Nobody buys web3 games, and it's been ~2 years. Until they figure out the MVP of it enhancing digital consumerism, all other promises are just a marketing spin.

It's funny, but as someone who's played it for a year, and yes, has spent $20, Genshin has remarkably non-in-your-face monetization. Plenty of games launch where the first screen is a sales pitch, but you actually have to look for it there. It's successful because it's a very well-put-together game experience-- smooth controls, plenty of content, a reasonable level of handholding. You've got to convince people they're actually going to have fun before dropping them in front of a credit card entry form.

Oh yeah, I played Genshin for a year as well. It is a very well-polished, high-budget game with some good implementations of gameplay mechanics.

Which makes it the quintessential example of the modern AAA skinnerbox game. Polished gameplay, a good initial hook, and an addictive gameplay loop.

Which is what Justin Kan and Co. are trying to create, but have been largely unsuccessful in doing so.

While it is actually ridiculous for the games you mentioned, it makes sense for certain FPS/Racing games. Plus, common asset sharing isn't the only thing. Distributed infra for certain cross game modules also make a lot of sense. I wrote[1] a small post summarizing all possible use cases of putting game assets/game itself on-chain.

[1]https://rnikhil.com/2022/06/27/web3-gaming.html

>"So a BF player could use COD skins?"

Something more realistic is can a player trade BF skins for COD skins. There doesn't need to be compatibility built into the game. Just having them as NFTs on the same chain unlocks new possibilities. For example instead of trading a BF player could lock up an expensive skin and borrow some cheaper COD skins to use for a weekend to show off at an esports tournament. After the weekend is over he returns the COD skins and gets his BF skin back.

And Activision and EA would agree to this why exactly?

Because it's cheaper to reuse the web3 ecosystem compared to spending resources recreating your own version. It saves development time and is a proconsumer move.

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