The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
I think that the people writing these things only have a very slim grasp of gaming, but they know it would be a good market to capture
The reason it seems like they didn't describe the "actual game" is that there is no actual "gameplay". You just pay to collect cats.
You can trade the cat tokens with other people, try to sell them on the marketplace, pay to generate semi randomized new cat tokens via "breeding", and... just have them under your wallet / name. There is no action, no RPG, no platforming, no game board... basically nothing besides collecting and swapping tokens. They actually do show the entire "gameplay loop" in this image from the article: https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-flow-chart-with-ar...
They encourage you to collect more with timed events, where you "win" a bonus for having collected a certain type of cat token, but that's about it.
If you're of a certain generation, you might remember a craze of kids collecting and trading Pokemon cards, and never really playing the game. It's basically like that except there is no underlying game to play, all you have are the tradable cards.
From the docs, lots of talk about value. Not much reason why. It reminds me of the Beanie Babies Valuation books. Made everyone scream over a $7 plushie.
At the time a lot of people in there were cracking Yahoo rares. Names that you can't make as username anymore.
Most coveted were ones with capitals, special characters, underscores at the beginning. People bought and sold those for thousands of dollars.
That made more sense to me than these crypto games. Those were at least something scarce and not manufactured. They had intrinsic value, especially for the cracker because they had to come up with name lists, and brute force the passwords, and use potentially trojan ridden hacking tools from shady phpnuke sites.
The usernames were pretty cool in contrast with the new username rules Yahoo had. Card trading just seems boring AF.
but something we do allow is for players to create characters on the main waifulabs site[1], and then share QR import codes of that custom characters with friends.
So yes, crypto is the focus and yes, gameplay is lacking (for those who seek different kinds of games). But those are separate issues rather than related.
In other words, CryptoKitties innovation was never going to be gameplay, because it is explicitly a clone of pet collecting games of yore with the spin being different underlying infrastructure & payments technology.
They already do this sort of thing with MtG Online, I think you can purchase and trade cards in-game. They also let you send them physical cards, and they will give you the in-game card in your account in return. Not sure if they go the other way around.
From WoTC's perspective, one of the downsides of a "public" blockchain would be that they don't get a cut of any transaction beyond the first one.
Exactly. They can track all this stuff in their own database. WotC doesn't stand to benefit from putting anything on a blockchain.
Except the people making money by running or grifting off a blockchain.
You say they will see benefit.
Yet all you mention is how the blockchain might usurp the faith wotc relies on.
Why would wotc ever fund their potential demise or depend on people that never had faith on their product in the first place?
By throwing it on the blockchain, WotC could market it as the digital card being basically as safe from vanishing as a physical card. "Even if we go bust in 50 years, your digital cards will all still be yours! You'll still be able to prove ownership of all your cards, and will still be free as ever to trade coughsell for incredible profitcough them!"
I have no idea if the market as a whole would bite, or how deeply. But there is a not-insignificant number of people who count on Magic cards gaining significant amounts of value over time. Some use it as a way to justify the purchases, while others have turned it into an outright investment strategy.
I can only imagine that digital cards reliant on WotC's active involvement to exist would suffer significant discounts.
But maybe being digital is such a huge hit in the first place that it doesn't ultimately matter. I have no idea. Hence, why I said it seems possible.
And if others are allowed to create their own servers so that the game can live outside of WotC's auspices, that would also undermine the value of the NFT cards, since anyone who is able to create their own implementation of the game could just as easily start creating non-NFT versions of the cards that people can use.
Even if WotC's servers go down, you could use the blockchain to prove ownership of a card for use in a live tournament. It's also possible for a third party to create their own server to implement the game, and then refer back to the blockchain for ownership.
As for non-official cards, I mean, yeah? That's the case with physical Magic cards too. Not even actual counterfeits have held the MTG secondary market back from astounding prices. Meanwhile non-NFT cards would be the equivalent of proxy cards - cards that aren't X, but both players agree to treat as X - which haven't been any more successful than counterfeits in holding Magic prices down.
I'm not claiming there would be greater faith in a blockchain than WotC, I'm just saying I see it as possible.
Furthermore, if said community creates tournaments and online services that require official WotC NFT to participate, that will further cement their value.
That you can create your own NFTs and your own tournaments isn't going to be of much use when the rest of the players only plays with the official NFTs and won't accept yours.
Unless it's hosted on some WotC server where only the NFT owner can access it. But that also undermines its value, since then you don't really own it any more than someone "owns" a Kindle book: barring breaking DRM, as soon as Amazon decides to shut the Kindle service down, its either gone now, or its days are numbered.
And this is one of the big things with many of the apps crypto promoters wave around that are about big incumbents adopting crypto: they implicitlt require those incumbents being motivated to create value that people invested in crypto infrastructure (the exact for depending on the particular cryptocurrency model) can capture rather than seeking to capture created value themselves.
I started playing it and I am having fun, unfortunately I'm not good enough to beat any real players though.
Do you think anyone paying >1k for a Pokémon or Magic card is actually using them to play?! That shit is in a sealed case and only sees daylight to impress people or to resell it. I've met collectors who use home printed cards because they are too scared to damage even 10$ cards.
over time, you may not even need the actual cards anymore and just have the vouchers.
Except it's you getting fucked in crypto.
(Fate somehow has exactly the same magic system as White Wolf Mage even though it's too old to have copied it. Not sure how that happened.)
The all-ages versions of Fate also remove all of the sex with minimal effect on the story.
Unless there’s a different Fate that also started of as eroge and spawned a massive franchise, it was first released in 2006, 13 years after White Wolf first released Mage: The Ascension, and so was very much not too early to have copied from Mage.
Also the other half of the setting is all about vampires, and it's definitely kind of like White Wolf Vampire, but not close enough to look intentional.
Still three years after Mage was published.
It's depressing to think about it.
And yes people who made gold in wow were also not gaming but working. It wasn't cool, fun or whatever 10 years ago
Books have nothing in common with gambling except for the books about gambling.
If you enjoy the book, your payout is those feeling of enjoyment. If you lose, the price is the cost of the book and the time you wasted reading it - but you have the paltry consolation prize of a now-second-hand book that you can sell at a loss to a used book shop.
And you can affect your odds of winning or losing, by going with a genre or author that you already have an affinity to (or not!)
I could be said to be gambling that my comment will be read. I am also gambling that someone will not disagree with me. I am gambling that by writing this comment I'm not wasting time that could have been better spent in other endeavors. I am gambling that I will not die of a stroke just after writing my comment, making my final conscious act a pointless one.
If it sounds absurd, that's because it is. Of course it's not gambling, and neither is reading a book.
I think cryptokitties is somewhere between Poker and Slot machines.
When I buy a book, I usually don't know its contents beforehand (the exceptions are I had copied it somehow in my earlier years, and now I want to buy it to come clean, or it is a classic I just never bought yet).
Most of the time, I rely on a friends reference, or a review online, or maybe I just buy by chance. And in either of these cases, there is a less than 50% chance I perceive the book as good. Which, to me, is a gamble. So I suppose there is an edge I don't get?
Gambling is I give you $X I have a,b,c % chance of getting A,B,C. Usually I get nothing. Nothing I can do can effect the outcome.
Colloquially, you might say "I don't like this author, but the reviews say blah was a blah, so I took a gamble". But that is clearly not the same as pure chance gambling.
D3 got much better when the real money auction house closed.
I spent probably half my time playing that game just doing arbitrage trading. For example a sorceress or necromancer would always give you 4-5 Perfect Skulls for a Stone of Jordan (SOJ) ring, and you could pretty easily buy an SOJ from a barbarian or amazon for 3-4 Perfect Skulls. Through nothing but these trades I was able to go from a couple SOJ (the most valuable 1x1 item in the game) to about 40 or 50 over the course of a few months.
My favorite AH score was a max stat level 3 chest piece that I sold for $25.
That piece was good for 5 or maybe 10 minutes of gameplay at the start of the game.
I knew it was a premium piece for that level and type. I knew they didn’t stay on AH long. That said, I didn’t want to compete with all of the lower price point folks, so i set the price to something absurd just to see what happened.
I have no idea why they bought it.
I had much better late game stuff for sale for much cheaper that never sold. It was a strange market — I’m glad it is gone.
D3 RMAH was bad because D3 was bad. At that time there was basically no itemisation, everything gear was basically dps/main stat/trifecta. D3 was so bad that the fix was to remove trading completely and never been brought back.
People traded D2 items for gear, runes and/or real money for decades, there is no problem and the game is alive for well.
Playing a little bit with game economics is fun to a certain point.
Vitalik famously was first inspired to build Ethereum when Blizzard nerfed a sword he had in World of Warcraft.
This makes no sense to me.
You are always at the mercy of the gaming company. "Stuff" in games has no meaning outside games. If you assign it meaning, you don't need an NFT or whatever: it's in your mind.
Vitalik could have drawn a picture of his magic sword, or simply relive his fond memories of it.
If Blizzard or whatever company takes the game down, the "stuff" becomes meaningless. Existing in blockchain is meaningless. Outside the game engine, it means nothing.
I've also heard "but other companies could take your NFT and...". Well, I'm skeptical. It's still the case that your stuff had its meaning attached to a game or account that no longer exists; whatever other companies do with it cannot replicate the original experience that gave it meaning, I.e. the game.
It's also unclear why Blizzard (or whatever company) would cooperate with making the ingame "stuff" remain outside their control.
Finally, if another company could build an enticing experience rivaling the original game, it's unclear why they would artificially tie it to a competitor (even risking lawsuits if they mentioned trademarks).
You couldn't have a blockchain equivalent of World-of-Warcraft. You have no meaningful way to testify that you recieve an item from killing a boss, for example.
The only thing you can really implement with cryptocurrency is a market game, gambling on the outcome of a game, or crypto-tokenized items/stats. These have their own problems as well, mostly being that their development structure is usually not decentralized enough to warrant the use of cryptocurrency.
If the game itself is decentralized too, that changes things, but it's unclear if it's possible to make a game like WoW like that.
Surely you could have a smart contract that implements that (and, in the extreme case, I guess you submit the random seed for this boss fight and a hash of the button inputs you used or something - of course there's no way to stop you using a bot to automate pressing the buttons at the right time, but that applies to real WoW too).
To the extent that it is broken in world-of-warcraft, it will be more broken here because there will be fees associated with playing, so players will be incentivised to make the most of their money by cheating and trying to optimize the smallest possible "proof".
Eventually, so many people will cheat that the actual game is considered to be a minor nusance. It's like TF2 idle servers. You incentivise players to not play the game.
Anywhere else and I would assume you were joking. This being HN, I have to assume you're being serious. So, at the risk of stating the obvious, that's the point of the blockchain. That you can provide verifiable proof for things like this.
The two methods mentioned here are quite flawed:
Kerbonut mentions the use of the signature of a gameserver to verify the loot. This obviously is not decentralized, and is essentially the same thing as having a centralized itemserver. This is part of what I mean when I said that "their development structure is not decentralized enough to warrant the use of cryptocurrency"
lmm mentions the use of a "proof-of-victory" given a random in-game challenge produced with a provably-fair RNG seed. Not only would this require a ton of bandwidth and CPU to store and verify these proofs (unless it's a turn-based game like chess or nethack I suppose), but it is not really sybil-proof. In other words, it puts people who play the game at a significant disadvantage to those who just bot. It incentivizes not actually playing the game.
Edit: note that this Decentralized-WoW thought experiment is fundamentally different from axie infinity. The case of axie infinity is a two-player game where they essentially gamble using the depreciation cost of their pokemon. It falls under the category I described as "gambling on the outcome of a game"
It's only work when that is not inherently fun - and if it isn't you don't solve that by letting people pay others to do the work so you get the results directly. If anything, putting monetary value on in-game achivements devalues the experience of getting them yourself and provides perverse incentives for the developers to make getting them without payment less fun.
> and it's all owned by some emotionless gaming company that might just decide to delete all your stuff, or just disappear all together
For centralized MMO games maybe. For single-player games or games that support self-hosting (or really, any third-party hosting independent of the original developer) this is not a problem. And if the developer is unwilling to allow third-party hosting then why do you think they will support a blockchain they can't control in some way?
> Giving players control of the things they worked hard to get just seems like the natural progression as we assign more and more value to the lives we live in virtual spaces.
Giving players control of virtual items means letting them copy and modify the bits. That's a great goal. Let's reform copyright so that you can freely modify software in a reasonable amount of time (much less than an average lifetime!) and require escrow of source data including reuitred server components to get copyright in the first place so that it is available once copyright expires - then Vitalik can have his own WoW version with the balance he likes (in theory at least).
It does not mean trying to further monetize what should be entertainment.
But let me clarify: I lived the wow time.
It destroyed 3 relationships from friends I know, it broke carrier chances for 2.
Yes there is a difference between grinding a little bit of gold vs playing it all day, not doing anything else anymore for your life and bragging about being able to buy a month abo with in-game gold
I totally get the appeal of challenges in well running raids but there was always the one person who made the game the only life content.
And yes there are still people being hardcore addicted to games like shooter. Depressed friends risking everything worthwhile for it.
Understithe appeal doesn't invalidate my comment.
Anyway, the game is very simple and it actually makes much more sense than the recent NFT fud. Essentially you combine characters to create new characters that have some of the traits of the parent characters. It's a breeding game.
I kind of see how it can be valuable to own an NFT character with certain traits that can be used to create other NFT characters. Unlike the recent NFT stuff, it makes sense within its universe. The NFT market on the other hand is just a hot patato game where you speculate that there exist a greater fool in a rigged marketplace.
It's also not helping that so many of these games are just card collecting games, because there was a need to integrate NFTs somehow (that's where profit is for the developers) so collectibles was the easy answer... and then they have pasted some lousy "gameplay" on top of it.
Also there is a whole exploitative side to certain of these games which setup a deliberately very high cost of entry, incentivizing a rent-seeking market where rich owners borrow their entry ticket and let poorer people work to earn the daily rewards available in game for them (because at this point it isn't really playing anymore).
I know of one notable exception, Cypto Royale [0], it's definitely a simple appearing game, basically multiplayer rock/paper/scissor mechanics, but if you do play it you can notice few more layers in gameplay (placement, size/hp management, wall physics)... so there is a bit of strategy and skill involved. Unlike so many other cyptogames they also don't require you to own or even know about crypto to play (it is free to play, it doesn't even require an account). Their approach, even for a simple looking game, seems way closer to actual gaming as a way to potentially get players accustomed to crypto.
But there are also more turn-based games which really are about the mechanics of which items/stats/buildings/lands you have, what their effects are, how to level up etc which all could be encoded in the chain. Its not a mainstream gaming format but thats where crypto ‘gaming’ could provide a new kind of experience. Although I would say the term on-chain game is more specific. The “game” could become as much about finding tools that give you an edge in accessing and navigating the on-chain data from yourself and other ‘players’. The genre is then competitive turn-based strategy with a turn timer (block time). I would compare it to playing competitive Civilisation with full map vision and real cash rewards. Which isn’t really mainstream gaming atm although I’m sure there is a minor audience for it, but for now I expect real on-chain gaming to stay pretty niche.
Considering blockchains survive for 40 years which is not a given.
[1] https://nerdist.com/article/dungeons-and-dragons-neverending...
Became so obsessed that I ended up hired by Dapper Labs and working on the CryptoKitties team, later helped design and launch NBA Top Shot on Flow. Now that we have (the markedly cheaper and easier) Flow and lots and lots of lessons learned from building NFT products, I'm excited for us to bring the next generation of CryptoKitties to life.
If you want to check out a fun crypto game that just recently launched from another developer, I urge you to check out dimensionxnft.com with an open mind.
From my point of view so far, even the best crypto game out there would have been better if it wasn't for the crypto aspect of it.
If this ecosystem is to provide value beyond the potential for making money, then what is it? It's hard to be excited about something that only has downsides.
1. The global worldwide market place. While this introduces commerce/real money, which come with very real downsides, it also makes the game high stakes (meaning most people play to the best of their ability). WoW and other games showed how much a vibrant marketplace can add to a game experience for some players, and having everything trading for essentially real money doesn't change that underlying level of engagement.
2. Permissionless development. While there are many examples of attempts at building on top of CryptoKitties fizzling out, there are also success stories, especially around "WCK"—a fungible token created by an unaffiliated third party developer that essentially created a worldwide "Give a Kitty, Take a Kitty" pool that let you send away any cat you didn't want and get back one that you preferred. And because it's on the blockchain and uses blockchain standards, it can also be used as liquidity and barter, both of which add to the experience. I don't believe I've ever seen something like this built on top of a non-blockchain game... certainly it wouldn't be quite as easy as this was to build! Some examples of other third party creations include an auto-breeding platform, a Kitty racing game, a Kitty battling game, Kitty cosmetics (your cat NFT can own its own hat NFT!), and a trustless Kitty bounty smart contract.
3. Almost unparalleled transparency. This has all kinds of fun side effects from allowing the community to fully "check the work" of the developer to what amounts to an open-to-everyone API. And what's more, this is a standardized API so that someone who builds tools for CryptoKitties would be able to also use those tools for Cheeze Wizards. Again, there are amazing third party tools built on the backs of APIs of online games all the time, but it's actually cool how much you get "for free" by being on the blockchain. The verified fairness is pretty cool IMO.
4. Immortal assets. I poured a lot into City of Heroes back in the day, and then one day the devs shut down the server, and took all my heroes with it. This is a very common refrain. As long as there are nodes out there running Ethereum, anyone can breed their Kitty NFTs. That's not nothing. (There's a lot of nuance here about art assets, IP rights, user interface, etc., and it's messy and still very much being figured out, but that's how the world works—you build it, then you improve it!)
5. Value capture. Yes, this almost always has evolved into speculation and nonsense valuations and irrational behavior. But still: when you buy a Kitty, you have the right to sell that Kitty. When you breed a new Kitty, you have the right to sell that Kitty. This is enabled by blockchain almost for free! Note this is distinct and different from point 1. WoW has a marketplace, but when you earn a legendary BoP sword, you cannot then capture that value by selling it if that's what you want to do. This point is as often riddled with downsides as it brings upsides, but the unique and novel truth of it makes it better than a non-blockchain game for some people.
Again, this comes from years of being in the space, playing with these toys, building these systems, being a part of these communities. For some of us, this has been incredibly exciting, and fun, because we chose to explore and figure out for ourselves what upsides this new frontier might hold for us.
1) "having everything trading for essentially real money doesn't change that underlying level of engagement." It has been long established that this is absolutely the case. A classic example of this would be Diablo 3's RMAH effectively destroying the game by having the entire economy be driven by real-world profit-seeking grind
2) I consider this to be very misleading. All of these intra-game features are not made available by the blockchain itself, but by the details of the various Smart Contracts involved. In that sense, the set of instructions available to would-be developers to interact with a game is going to be limited by the operations (and the various rules governing them) that are present in the smart contracts. If a game features permission-less development like this, it's because its developers have decided to make the requisite operations available and documented. This is no different than a regular documented public API.
3) I see nothing preventing this from being done without the blockchain.
4) This is the one potentially interesting wrinkle, but I find it to have marginal interest at best. Assets are inherently immortal unless explicit steps are taken by developers to prevent them to be. What is actually at play here is Immortal Entity Ownership, aka Immortal Scarcity. That's very interesting from a revenue-making potential, but not really much more than that.
5) That does not make the game itself better though.
MOST games I've seen don't provide a public API for players to interact with, and even when players do reverse engineer them, they get accused of cheating, hacking, whatever, and often get their accounts banned.
In the world of blockchain gaming, it's trivial to build tools and meta-games around anything, and there's basically nothing that the original developers can do to stop it. I can host a small bit of static HTML that gives users the ability to battle cryptokitties with each other, and capture each other's kitties. Then at the end of the day, the winner can go back to the main cryptokitties site, and breed their new kitties like normal. I don't need to ask anyone's permission, and all I need is a stable place to land some HTML, and maybe deploy some contracts depending on the level of integrations I want to build. I don't need to apply for an API key, or start up an email conversation with anyone at Dapper Labs. I can just build it, and anyone with a web3 capable browser can play along.
This is the magic of "permissionless" systems, and it's the standard across the blockchain gaming ecosystem.
It's not trivial, because making fun metagames is hard, because game design is hard, and blockchain is not a shortcut to it.
> I can host a small bit of static HTML that gives users the ability to battle cryptokitties
This is backwards. A game about battling kitties must start with kitty battling gameplay that is fun. This is like discussing the programing language -- who cares? Tell me how your game is fun.
Blockchain won't help you at all there. Nothing about it makes anything "fun".
You are proving the other commenter's point: blockchain is not a special sauce for games. Whether a game is enjoyable or not has nothing to do with blockchain. In fact, it turns to be the opposite: if blockchain is involved, you can almost bet there's very little gameplay at all, because that's not what the developers care about.
It doesn't need to be "real" money, just something people value (even if its in-game assets). But having something at stake definitely does alter the gameplay
Try playing poker for "fun" (without real money), and then agin with money at stake. People play a lot more seriously, the psychology of the game changes.
People have always been insanely competitive, without bringing in a token in the middle. All you're doing is making it impossible to play (or not lose money) if you're not trying your hardest, all the time.
2/ You're really going to pretend you've never seen communities make their own services on top of a game? The only real difference is that it is fully automated in this case, but service markets have existed forever. Path of Exile has a whole discord with tens of thousands of users just to exchange things.
3/ Only if Cheese Wizards is a carbon copy of CryptoKitties, just changing names. Otherwise, data structures are different behaviours are different, and your work just has to be redone. Like in the current world. But it's true, at least it's open.
4/ You gotta really fucking love your game if you're willing to keep minting (and therefore paying) for NFTs that are worthless and unusable anywhere else
5/ This is an absolute cancer that has made every single game that added real money trading objectively worse. It makes every interaction with your game make you take into account the potential money loss. Like making your kitties spin? Too bad sucker, that's not the optimal money making strat, enjoy feeling ever so slightly bad every time.
The only useful point is the openness of the API. Everything else are things we already do in games (good and bad), but worse. Anyone in this industry not seeing this has either zero experience with games, or destructive tendencies just to make a bit of cash on misery.
I can only see the "open API" benefit for free open source games. So it wouldn't have helped Vitalik and his famed WoW sword.
Then again, making fun games is hard, and there's no escaping it. So maybe it wouldn't help free games either.
Had City of Heroes implemented their heroes "on blockchain", this would have gotten you nowhere.
CoH's heroes would have been useless outside their servers, blockchain or not. They mean nothing if you don't have the game's engine to make then do fun things.
NFTs only work when they are the meaning in themselves, but this can only happen when the "game" is fundamentally trivial and uninteresting, like CryptoKitties. Real games require an engine to run them, and if the engine shuts down, your "assets" become meaningless.
Gameplay is what matters. Making a server open-source is more meaningful than running the assets on blockchain.
All I'm saying is, if Nintendo made a Pokemon NFT, another company such as Ubisoft would not be able to add Pikachu to their blockchain based game without an intellectual property license by Nintendo. This would seemingly make a Pokemon NFT rather pointless.
Just to clarify: someone who owns a CryptoKitty decides to send it to the HyperDragons smart contract that handles the absorption. It's not about stealing anything. You use your assets in CryptoKitties to boost your dragon in HyperDragons.
The mechanisms to transfer a Kitty to the HyperDragons lie within the CryptoKitty Smart Contract. This is not particularly different than a regular API, where the available operations have been chosen, specified, and made available to the public at large by the developers.
The only real difference with a public-facing documented traditional API is that said API will outlive the original product. But that doesn't make CryptoKitties a better game, since Cripto Kitties won't be a thing anymore when that comes into play.
I can see the "end game" and it looks nice. But I don't know how to get there. I don't know if its even possible to get there given the hurdles involved - some of the required attributes from the involved actors feels contradictory.
It looks like a pet breeding game. You "own" cartoon cats - visual representations of distinctive bundles of characteristics contained in a NFT. You generate more NFTs by "breeding" two existing cats (executing the smart contract), which results in random combinations of their characteristics in offspring.
What to do with them? Speculate on their value, same as any NFT.
As a "game" this sounds incredibly unsophisticated compared to normal video games - something that might have passed during the flash era of gaming, or maybe today on itch.io as a weekend project. The only "hook" outside of this is the speculation / potential to earn (and I imagine if you're in on the scam, earning is a lot of fun).
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pikpok.wtd...
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clusterduck/id1531250914
You basically don't do anything except watch what weird mutations come out from the breeding. In Clusterduck, you can only have up to 30 ducks, so once you hit the limit, you have to throw a duck into the pit to sacrifice it. Sometimes when sacrificing a duck, a large monster spawns from the pit, and if you tap it enough times, it'll spawn a duck with a "cursed" trait of some sort.
I called it more of a sandbox than a game, but there are also Fancy Chases, events where a specific limited-time breeding goal is introduced and it's a race to be among the first to achieve this goal and breed a Fancy Kitty.
Not saying it's for everyone, but it's definitely something that thousands of people found and find pretty darn fun (again: if expensive).
But do they? They could just as easily be compulsively chasing some chance to cash out big.
Congratulations on also doing limited time events, welcome to the year 2000 of online gaming!
He ended up declaring bankruptcy
If you check out the Arcade you'll see there are lots of fun games - my personal favorites are Twilight Struggle, Poker and Red Imperium. You can do things have encrypted peer-to-peer chat and video channels while gaming, and all gameplay is provably fair.
Agree there is a bias in media coverage, but it's not because there isn't fun stuff happening and is more because of selection-bias towards talking about speculative assets and token speculation. Also not a tremendous amount of overlap between people who actually play games and those pitching breathless articles to tech media.
It's in the title of the article. It's a "Blockchain Game". That's what went wrong. It was a flawed concept from its inception. Blockchains are pretty cool from a math/cryptography standpoint, but they really do not provide added value in most areas people try to apply them to.
CryptoKitties is a digital trading card game. You get cards, you can "breed" cards together to make new cards, you trade/buy/sell cards. That's it. Nowhere at any point in this "game" is a blockchain necessary. Nowhere at any point does a blockchain add any value whatsoever. In fact, due to transaction fees, I'd argue the blockchain actively detracts from the game.
The idea of an artist signing their work in a cryptographically unique way is not new or revolutionary, and it certainly doesn't need a blockchain. There's a reason the general sentiment the art community has towards NFTs is overwhelmingly negative: it's because they literally actively harm us.
Lately I've been thinking if it would be possible to have an MMORPG game where instead of a server all the data would be saved in a blockchain/linked list. The biggest concern I have though is the latency and speed.
Could blockchains be fast enough or in some other way protected from malicious actors to allow actual real time game play? Like World of Warcraft, or would it just be too slow.
I've been thinking about this, because servers are expensive and doing it this way you would have, kind of, solved the problem of scalability - no queues.
There would be no coins or NFTs or anything like that.
Just a decentralised MMORPG server/game thus saving the developers from the server costs.
What for? What advantage would this have over storing data on a server?
> I've been thinking about this, because servers are expensive and doing it this way you would have, kind of, solved the problem of scalability - no queues.
You're just offloading the cost onto the players, and offloading the queuing mechanic onto the blockchain.
I'm sorry to be rude, but this is another comment desperately trying to find a use for the blockchain, casting out a rod into infinite idea space, and pulling out a boot.
Mostly because I'm kinda poor and can't even think about buying it renting servers. That's why I thought that such a solution would allow me to keep developing my game while the players could still play the game.
If it would be possible, which from replies to my comment, I'm guessing isn't, it would also mean that even if I died, people could still play because the "servers" wouldn't shutdown.
>You're just offloading the cost onto the players, and offloading the queuing mechanic onto the blockchain.
That's kind of the point, MMORPG are, from what I understand, quite expensive to run. Thus if they were run by the community it would be cheaper for the developers and those resources could be further used to work on the game.
>I'm sorry to be rude, but this is another comment desperately trying to find a use for the blockchain, casting out a rod into infinite idea space, and pulling out a boot
I am surprised by the negativity that the HN crowd has poured onto me. Since it would solve one of the biggest issues with MMORPGs, which is - servers shutting down.
I love MMOs and it breaks my heart knowing that I'll probably never ever again be able to play Tera and many other MMOs...
Block times are complete state updates. The transactions that rely on the state of another transaction in the chain are 100% optimistic, and will roll back all dependent transactions. Now, that’s fine if you’re willing to roll back say…3000ms of your game state. But that’s all client side stuff, and that code is 1000% exposed, and you can’t upgrade it in the normal fashion. You also need validators for chain transactions, and your game can just be forked at any time by validators, splitting the player base. Kind of cool, but kind of defeats the balance and minimum population required to keep a game running. Also…the validators still need to run. Recovering a forked chain can only happen is someone has the state somewhere and is willing to seed new validators.
Sometimes, things need to end for another thing to begin. Sometimes it’s just best to move on.
I'm sorry. I'm not trying to insult you directly - but I do think your idea is not a good one, I don't think it solves the problems you think it does, I don't think the problems you posit are the biggest issues with MMORPGs, and I think it'll create even more problems even if it did address the issue you brought up.
That's is if the latency could be fast enough for normal gameplay.
The only reason that users might be willing to eat that cost is if they believe they are "owning" an asset that will appreciate somehow (a la Cryptokitties). The second the thing they own stops appreciating, they stop paying to play.
It would be for me and since many private servers exist for many different games, it is for others too.
This would, if it would be functional, just spread the burden of the server to all players.
In that sense, just by playing the game, you would be keeping it alive.
Or the the blockchain would be centralised and so useless.
This idea fails even in the abstract.
The problem now is... how do you do the trading part? You could go to the trouble of yourself building a marketplace for the cards and then integrating all of the payment methods required, and then dealing with all of the trust and fraud issues that result from people sending money via banks or PayPal that they later chargeback or refund, all while dealing with whatever crazy tax implications come up from running a market.
But you don't want to do any of that: you want to code a game, and it isn't like Wizards of the Coast is trying to take money off of the aftermarket! They just make money by selling the initial randomized official card packs. Because you went digital now you are doing a ton of extra work and are wasting a ton of time dealing with payment processing issues when none of that is related to your actual business model or product design.
And, at the end of the day, doing that giant marketplace is a hard job that other companies specialize in. If I told you eBay provided some kind of digital asset API that let you simply assign tracking numbers to products but then eBay kept track of the ownership as it changed and all your game had to do is ask "what cards does this user still own?" when it opens, I imagine a ton of developers would jump on that bandwagon.
Only, eBay doesn't provide that API, and likely would avoid doing so out of concern you would shut down the game on a whim and cause them issues; and, even if they did, now your entire game backend would then be built around a single marketplace that might randomly pull your game for some reason and shut down your entire company in a way where you are SCREWED as your end-to-end ownership pipeline is modeled inside of eBay's database rather than being something you control and can migrate.
If only there were some off-the-shelf technology for tracking digital assets that you could trivially add as a dependency to your project, letting you write a few lines of code to define your asset and which had APIs for querying ownership... one which was an open ecosystem controlled by a shared protocol instead of a single company, thereby allowing not just one market but any number of competing markets with different ideas on auctions or escrow to exist. Wouldn't that be amazing?!
Well: that's Ethereum; like, that's precisely what Ethereum is doing. If you think collectible trading card games aren't a dumb idea--and even if you hate them and think the premise is bad for gaming, I am going to remind you that these things are SUPER POPULAR and so your opinion doesn't in some sense matter here as you are just ignoring reality--then Ethereum is a GLORIOUS idea that makes it absolutely trivial for game developers to build them and for users to participate.
Isn't this any relational database where you can set the owner_id of an item?
> your entire game backend would then be built around a single marketplace that might randomly pull your game for some reason and shut down your entire company
Most online games have some sort of digital assets they have to keep track of, and that's one of the trivial things to implement.
Also, BTW: part of what makes the physical cards valuable in the long term is that even if the company that sold them goes out of business, the cards don't disappear and they still work to play the game... your dismissive attempt to build this sort of thing using centralized tech is thereby pretty ridiculous on the face of it even if you didn't try to tackle the money issues yourself.
What you want is a game that has no backend and preferably is coded using forwards-compatible technologies like HTML/JavaScript that can use these APIs to access their state for the long term... and again, that's Ethereum.
(Note: I ran a market for apps for over a decade and before that I was a game developer for almost half a decade; I thereby know what things are and aren't hard.)
I mean, if you put it like that it sounds as if the main advantage of the blockchain technology here is to offload responsibility for the inevitable issues that arise when people start trading for real money, such as scams or people regretting their purchases. But you're not actually solving these problems, you just gain the ability to point to the decentralized blockchain and claim there's nothing you can do about it.
What's the point of owning a Fortnite skin if the game is gone and you can not use or showcase it anymore? Not to mention that even if you somehow manage to retrieve the 3d asset from the information stored in the blockchain, you probably can't legally use it anywhere else due to copyright laws.
Then why does OpenSea etc. exist?
It seems to me that Ethereum just solves the trivial problem of providing an API to do the trade itself. You could easily have a trusted company providing the exact same service cheaper and more efficiently with a centralized database. If having a unified trading backend provided was something game companies actually wanted, it would have existed already. You don't need blockchain for that. You may have problems with the company providing the platform going belly-up and the backend disappearing, or that they messed with the trades and broke trust. Then you could say Ethereum would be a good replacement providing additional value (in exchange for cost/speed/efficiency though). But the thing Ethereum would be replacing and improve upon never existed in the first place, which tells me nobody really wanted it.
Building a service on top of Ethereum that facilitates the trades, lets you view items, lets you store the data behind the items in a robust way.. that's what would provide most of the value. But that's hard. And it seems we're pretty far from having a really robust/universal solution built on top of Ethereum, for anything more than URL to JPEGs. And even when we do, I'd argue that we never needed Ethereum as the backend to begin with. Most likely the items on the Ethereum blockchain will still be completely meaningless and without significant value without a huge frontend built by some large corporation. And then that corporation might as well have used a centralised ledger to track those items. I.e. something we could do 10 years ago, and would have been done 10 years ago if there was interest for it. Enthusiasts could build open-source replacements, yes, but by the time they get there the items will probably have lost most of their value, the fad will have passed.
Creating collectible/tradable cards and items is hard. It takes physical work. You need convince shops to get it out in the market etc. That's what provides a lot of the rarity of those things. When Ethereum makes it easy to create new collectibles, you'll flood the market continuously. Fads will come and go much faster. It'll be harder for the items to have staying value. Ethereum might ruin the very thing it's trying to facilitate.
Or I could be completely wrong. We'll see in a decade or so I guess.
As do most things so it's really neither relevant nor a drawback worth discussing.
>Why does ${PROJECT} use ${TECHNOLOGY}?
>So it doesn't have ${DRAWBACK}.
>Most other things have ${DRAWBACK}, so it's really neither relevant nor worth discussing.
It creates a provable, transferable, composable, tamper-proof "ownership" record of the digital signature.
Transferability is useful for key rotation. If you can't transfer your ownership to a new key, then if the old key becomes compromised, you can't prove ownership anymore because anyone else can sign using your key. To fix this you have to rely on the original signer to provide you with a revocation and an updated signature, which they may not be willing or able to do (and what if they themselves have rotated their key?)
Basically, to get key rotation to work properly you have to get revocation to work, which means ultimately you have to recreate a trustworthy timestamping service for digitally signed events, which is what a blockchain definitionally does.
Either that, or everyone has to agree on a third party to keep track of revocations, much like with OCSP or the MIT key server. Then, trust that third party not to tamper with the timestamps, and trust them to continue providing their timestamping service far into the future.
Anyways, I think the bigger problem is that neither GPG nor blockchain actually solve the "ownership" problem of digital assets. These can be copied without any problem, so proving which ones are original and which ones aren't is impossible without some kind of DRM or verification service, and that's not something that can be done with the blockchain.
So it's hard to draw any conclusions about whether the data reflects an actual peak in user activity, or just a peak in scams.
Unless you have enough comparable items (e.g. paintings by the Dutch masters) it's really difficult to determine the value of something that's rarely sold.
I always thought it was "Mt. Gox", like a mountain of sorts. Turns out it's Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange.
Edit: MtG seems like it has some kind of evergreen popularity, and various format changes, changes in the list of banned cards, reprints, and changes in the metagame will mean that prices of individual cards can vary wildly over time. So if something was sold for a ridiculous price a couple times, it's possible that something changed (Targmogoyf used to be very expensive, for example).
Wizards seems pretty good at catering to a variety of players, both collectors and non-collectors.
"We know UNIX TM backwards and forwards." -Mt Xinu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtXinu
Famous for the great posters they handed out at Usenix:
"4.2 > V" BSD -vs- System V, X-Wing / Death Star Poster
https://www.ericconrad.com/2008/12/
I love all the old telephone equipment in the explosion!
When it launched as a Bitcoin exchange in 2010, the unused domain was "Mt. Gox" from the beginning.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox#Founding_(2006%E2%80...
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/t...
- Scarcity, artificial or otherwise.
- Subjective value. Neither an NFT or a trading card provides substantial, measurable utility to its owner. But, we can agree they have "value" of some kind.
- Lack of oversight. Governments doesn't have entire offices monitoring irregular sale prices for Obelisk the Tormentor or Mickey Mantle.
- Low transaction volume. If you're the only market-maker, you can set your own price.
These attributes lead me to believe that NFTs and trading cards would both very effective tools for someone trying to launder money.
You can take away any one of those attributes, and the asset would become much more difficult to use for money laundering. For NFTs, oversight seems inevitable in the next couple of years. One can only hope.
Trading cards kind of do - TCG card prices generally hinge on actual play utility as much as rarity.
Outside of really old cards that are just valuable because of their extreme rarity lots of cards that are technically rare are still only worth pennies because they aren't actually any good in the game. While cards that are no rarer or older, but are much better in play are worth tens or hundreds of dollars.
And even those cards that are mostly expensive because they're exceptionally old and hard to find, like from first print runs of games that weren't popular yet still differ in price quite heavily based on their utility in actual gameplay. Albeit mostly from the cachet that that gives them rather than from buyers desire to actually play them. e.g. Black Lotus is more valuable than other cards printed in the same quantity in the same set because it's also the most powerful card.
You see this practice in art and collector car sales. It's rumored that if you see a painting go for an insane amount of money, often these sales are between "friendly" parties for the sole purpose of driving up the value of that art.
...Or is there?
The sealed product command a gambler’s premium individual cards cannot, and the market has more liquidity as its way more fungible than a specific individual card. Where individual card prices are more or less an auction, sealed product actually trades like a commodity. But this commodity’s scarcity increases over time.
Of course Wizards of the Coast could print the secondary market out of existence at any time, like Pokémon TCG has done recently. But they haven’t done so for 30 years and seem to prefer to conspicuously ignore the secondary market, while obviously being aware of it.
When the oil futures went negative, it wasn't the case that the value of oil was negative - this was about the structure of the market and the sorts of positions people were caught in when the pandemic hit. We continued to consume oil throughout the pandemic, and so I'd say we continued to value it.
Another example would be, if a rancher has a lot of cow poop, they might pay a farmer to take it away. You could say that the cow poop has a negative price on it. But the farmer is going to make use of it as fertilizer; from the farmer's perspective, this is a commodity that has value.
It's true though that there are a million theories of value and it's impossible to say what something's value is definitively, you can only make a decision about what is value is to you.
But when wash trading is and to impact the perceived value, it does so fraudulently; it supplies information to traders - "there is a lot of interest in this security, and the (last traded) price is rising" - which is a lie. Some people will argue this too is a normal and healthy part of markets, but I don't think they've given enough thought to what sort of equilibrium that game will settle into.
But of you’ve ever traded NFTs its hard to really begin with the assumption that trading volume is fake because bots and market makers buy from you so fast. You know that wasn't a fake or wash trade, while there is a pervasive audience of onlookers that are trying to prove a negative.
You know that funds in bankruptcy court have successfully sold $30,000,000 worth of the NFTs on their books as ordered, without issue or further controversy about where the proceeds came from
You know that DAOs have liquidated $30,000,000 worth of NFTs on their books as determined by the community, without issue
How much convincing does anyone need to move off of “its all wash trading and money laundering” to “yeah thats possible there is also lots of liquidity”, it doesn’t really make sense to make the former perception their whole identity
this is more so for others who are looking for validation of only wash trading. I’m mostly saying some assumptions have to be made, and relative comparison to other projects and understanding actual trades occur… a lot, moves the assumptions towards more distinct market participants than assuming the nonexistence of any market participants
Does that still hold true today, or was that the case six months ago before the NFT market crashed?
most collections are essentially just tokens with a picture, the same practices on token exchanges are prevalent on nft marketplaces
Ah, like that $532M Punk wash trade that was clearly visible on-chain?[1] I guess we'll never know if it was real or fake.
[1] https://decrypt.co/84756/no-someone-didnt-really-pay-532-mil...
I agree with the other part of the comment. Blockchains do not track "persons" but "wallets" and so metrics like "number of users" will not be accurate. But it is not accurate to imply that it is impossible to recognize wash trades. In many cases they are very obvious, and even can be automatically flagged. In other cases - like with CEX mixers - only the authorities can detect the fraud.
I see. Okay, each of the pieces are necessary. Thanks for the explanation.
Nobody cares that you sold your nft to a virgin address funded solely by the tornado cash relay
It's not "legal" at all, because it's still proceeds of crime. Although it may "appear" legal and be very difficult to trace back to the source, it's still not actually legal.
NB: I work in fintech but have no particular experience on the fraud / KYC / AML side of things. This is just how I imagine it would work at a high level.
The approach described here seems more plausible https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32857382
If you fund it from your coinbase account, coinbase is going to tell the taxman about both your wallets... so no buerno. If you fund another wallet from a known wallet... the tax man can still see that. If you use Tornado cash, Coinbase is going to block it. I just don't think it's as easy as people think it is.
This seems shockingly high to me
Absolutely nothing went wrong. 1-3 USD is a totally fair price for a random set of bytes producing random picture of cat. What was wrong in the beginning with those who paid thousands - that is the question.
They’re inflationary collectibles that were a fad, of course they’re going to lose value. The article feels intellectually dishonest.
Impersonating both sides of a transaction does not seem too difficult, and not very costly, as long as the fees are kept small.
If true, this seems insane.
If you're sidelined by the market because resources are being used by people who feel they have a greater need for them than you (who bid higher), that's an efficient market. It's no different than being priced out of buying corn or wheat - there's not an infinite amount available for everyone to buy at whatever price they please.
The resource I want isn't "block verification". That's Ethereum's problem, not mine. I want the thing I'm trying to buy. So I disagree the market is efficient, there's a tax on goods unrelated to the good in question, and I would use Visa to avoid it, as the other poster said in what you call a "weird flex".
The “NFT” aspect distracts most from the obvious:
The physical collections market is hugely profitable, supply is hugely manipulated and unknown, and we just had no transparency into any of this until it went onchain
None of the consumer activity in the NFT collections market is really unique, we just get to see issuer revenue numbers in real time and supply
All the market is saying is “wow I should really be selling stuff to collectors“
No skills really needed beside being able to click and pay the initial fee.
The ultimate question for crypto as a whole is whether the mass market wants digital possession that transcends a single centrally managed database. Personally am convinced we'll get there, but the onboarding mustn't happen through speculation, but specific unique utility, mostly interoperability/composability.
Even if the market wants this, it's certainly not what is being offered. If OpenSea delists your NFT in their single centrally managed database, it may as well no longer exist.
An analog original could be valuable or at least meaningful because it's impossible to create an identical copy of anything in which exists in the material world.
But there is no way to distinguish between two copies of digital data.
- It doesn't guarantee that you are the first or exclusive owner of this digital asset
- It doesn't correlate to physical ownership
- It doesn't hold any water in a legal sense, if you want your ownership of an NFT to be ratified then you need to use the same centralized avenues as everyone else
There is nothing novel in this. You could do it in Bitcoin too by agreeing that a certain transaction structure that includes a digital hash is a valid way to signify an original with that hash, and a spend from that address represents an ownership change.
It's simply a convention, and people don't do it because it's mostly a useless diversion from established ways to record and trade IP.
The true NFT innovation is the marketing gimmick that such a convention has any real world relevance and somehow magically makes the IP non-fungible. This enabled massive speculation on essentially worthless (and fully fungible) IP, expressed in a clunky and impractical distributed database.
Setting the scene: Before there were Banks, Mayors, Kings, or Mob bosses. Some random town or village. The wealthiest farming family has bought/fought (an exchange of a different type of resource) for most of the land in the town. That family has started to employ people on their land to build more wealth. This family doesn't know what to do with their wealth. They own all of the gold and jewels the traveling sales people bring by. They have built a castle and store treasures in their vault. They hire a militia to keep the peace. They have more money coming in than they know what to do with. Even the people in the town are happy. They now have a big wall paid for by this family. The family's militia is no fun, but it really has kept the peace. Trade is going well, and the towns folk haven't had gone a winter hungry in years.
Scene 1: One day a traveling artist brings canvas with chalk based drawing. A young adult from the wealthy family, called X, have seen similar, but this one is big. Its bigger than ever and connects with them emotionally. They want it. Sadly its already been sold. The artist offers to get a second made and bring it next month. However, X has connected with it emotionally. They connect with it so much they don't just want it, they want no one else to have it. They offer the artist more money than the artist's lifetime earnings to never again make chalk on canvas again. The canvas is hung up.
Scene 2: Everyone else in the town laughs/grumbles, "they spent 10 lifetimes of our earnings on a big canvas of chalk?". "No so that the artist would never make another". "... but the artist doesn't even live here. Couldn't they just make another?"
Scene 3: 3 years later, the canvas is a big deal in town. To some, laughable. To others, luring. Many more artists brought over canvas of chalk and many wealthyish families bought them for more reasonable amounts, but the wealthy family didn't just have any old canvas of chalk, theirs was a "..." no other could be made. The others are bought and sold, but their canvas is priceless.
Scene 4 - Alt A: Its the middle of the night. A band of thieves, orphans barely in their teens, an adultish figure keeps them in order and has directed them into the castle. The jewels and gold are in the vault, its very guarded but the children don't turn right towards the basement. Everyone that has tried for the vault has been hung in the town square. They move quietly to the great room. Their orders are clear. They pull down the canvas, open the frame, roll up the canvas, and are out. (in the morning) The town bells ring. The streets are a mess of militia. The thieves are already miles away and meeting their fence.
Scene 4 - Alt B: There has been a multi year famine in town. The town is upset, angry with the family. The solution is to go to war! They do battle with the neighboring city. They just happen to win. The cost was many lives but now they have enough reserves to get through many winters. This doesn't solve the actual root cause and the fields still don't make food. The resources continue to deplete and the canvas of chalk was sold at a massive loss to some close enough but far away town's wealthy family. Mostly as a reminder / teaching tool for their children not to "waste" money like X. "It drives a town to famine".
Both versions of this story have happened through human history. They just predate documentation. Meanwhile, Art today can still be worth a lot of money.
If you’d like to see a “blockchain game” that is succeeding and not dependent on simple buy/sell token mechanics, see Dark Forest and 0xMonaco.
Simpler, happier times.
(self plug) I'm also working on an NFT parody game https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1609874752 - it's a simulated trading & collecting market for emojis.
I'm always confused why people call cryptokitties a game, there's barely anything to play with. Maybe using blockchain makes it a lot harder to implement actual game features, or maybe it just corrupts your incentives lol.
But besides side chains are there other approaches to allowing newer crypto currencies to be highly liquid and handle large volumes of transactions at low cost? This issue seems like it's a recurring problem for crypto.
https://nftgo.io/collection/cryptokitties/overview
Anyone with more knowledge able to clarify?
> Market capitalization is calculated as the sum of each NFT valued at the greater of its last traded price and the floor price of the collection, respectively.
So their market cap calculation does not attempt to capture a current fair market value for all outstanding CryptoKitties. For a non-fungible asset like this, just using the last sale price like this will always give a lagging indicator. In some sense, you could argue that it lags the fair market value by a possibly infinite amount of time.
Concretely, this method would assume that the Dragon cryptokitty that the article discusses has been worth a constant 600 ETH that hasn't fluctuated by even one iota in over 4 years.
I don't know how much better one could do for a market cap calculation. It certainly wouldn't be practical to individually appraise all 2 million cryptokitties on a regular basis. Perhaps one could look at how prices of more frequently traded cryptokitties have fluctuated over time and use that to generate a scaling factor for the old ones. But even that might have downsides. How do you account for the possibly large percentage of cryptokitties that belong to wallets whose keys have been lost? It doesn't make sense to count those into the market capitalization, because they are no longer part of the market. The method being used at least has the advantage of being clean and objective. It's just not particularly useful, is all.
I could create a new coin with a huge market cap very easily: I'm creating 1,000 billion coins, and I'm selling to a friend one coin for $1, then never selling anything again. The market cap is now $ 1,000 billion right?
So do they own the rights to those clips or is it another url to something someone else owns?
Any news/sport organization that wants to use some clip of LeBron dunking that's been "tokenized" doesn't need to reach out to, pay, or even care about the NFT "owner".
Cryto Kittes -> Beanie Babies -> Cabbage Patch Dolls
Cryto itself is like an ideological movement, a bit akin to the heady utopian populism of socialism in the start of the last century.