I'm still waiting for NFT's to take over the video gaming space, its just around the corner!
Oh, that's funny. The Goddess of Victory is Nike.[1] But the game people are probably scared of the shoe company that uses the same name.
There was also the famous Nike anti-aircraft missile, once deployed around major American cities.[2]
That doesn't sound like a NFT to me.
"A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique digital identifier that is recorded on a blockchain" [1]
FIFA has an in-game market where you can buy/sell/trade cards, for in-game scrip. Want to sell your special Killian Mbappe card you just pulled? Congrats, you can get 1,000,000 FifaCoins, not redeemable for real money. Of course, you can certainly buy FifaCoins for real money.
A blockchain implementation could potentially allow people to sell that card directly to somebody else, for real money (or more specifically, crypto tokens that can be redeemed for real money). Would you rather have 1,000,000 FifaCoins, or $100?
Whether or not this is desirable to games is a different question, but the game is already essentially pay-to-win, so it's not like it would ruin the game from that perspective. It already has microtransactions. The main reason you probably won't be seeing this is because it would cut the publisher (EA) out of the loop, which is very, very lucrative for them.
it's never really seemed like a limitation that needs a technical back end to fix it, it needs people to want to set it up.
It was removed about eighteen months in, because it made the metagame significantly less fun. Switching from a localized rarity table with some light trading to an efficient global market meant that finding anything less than best in class equipment (bounded to level) was a disappointment compared to what could be bought on the market, and had to be to avoid flooding market supply.
Getting rid of the market and implementing more generous local loot algorithms probably gave the game at least 5 years more life.
For a good reason. The blockchain doesn't add much over a database. Players being able to sell their items? Steam does that without a blockchain, albeit not for real money. Being able to take items between games? Almost no devs (or players) really want that. But blockchain would add difficulty changing things if there's a bug with the items (or not, but you lose the "security" it's supposed to add).
All 3 of those are possible with a traditional database.
Even if they wanted to provide a system for sharing those assets and other marketplaces being able to built on top of it, a blockchain still doesn't actually provide any benefits.
Game dev companies don’t want that, they want to keep selling you stuff. See: games like the Sims
Games should be about having fun, not second jobs, unless you're playing a simulator where your fun is doing the job.
I don't want to play games where 90% of the players are using the game to try and beat capitalism somehow. There are 100 reasons why this'd destroy gameplay.
* The majority of players would be concentrated on the highest value grind tasks.
* Scams would be rampant. They are already rampant in games without this mechanic. Now imagine how bad they'd be if your items had actual monetary value hooked up to them.
* Gang like behavior is pretty much guaranteed to emerge. So, it wouldn't be just one player grinding like crazy, but groups of players dedicated to making the game miserable for anyone grinding on their turf.
* It would encourage actual real-world problems/crime. Now instead of being able to meet up with people and talk about the game, you run the risk of being mugged or stalked for game currency.
Just a really terrible idea.
And these things I'm talking about aren't imaginary. There're already more than a few articles about games like EVE Online and WoW where the marketplace of those games has led to the problems I listed.
EVE's "Real life threats" policy didn't show up because it wasn't a problem [1]
[1] https://support.eveonline.com/hc/en-us/articles/856270680092...
For example, one of the times it happened to RuneScape (which also has constant scammers too!): https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/imnp0g/every_sin...
If my game licenses were on the Blockchain I could give them to my kids when I die.
Feels weird explaining this on HN.
And it also doesn't require blockchain. Valve not allowing it isn't a technological limitation, it's a policy. The system can't stop you from leaving a sheet of paper with your username and password on it, but Steam can ban you if they somehow find out.
Go ahead and explain how the tech of a Blockchain prevents Valve from doing what it wants with the game licenses it sells.
If they go into the Steam server code and add:
if username = 'dingnuts':
return 403
(Hint: You don't.)
So now you're back to "a database hosted at Valve" with extra steps.
Feels weird explaining this on HN.
which has rather good trading mechanics in the game (for non-NFT objects) and has a total of 20 or so NFT objects in the game. A handful of players own most of them, for instance there is only one type of watch you can wear in the game and there are only five of those and four of those belong to the same person. My son did see someone wearing a watch.
You can't say the NFT ruined the game for other players but you also can't say it is a success, I wouldn't say that until you have broad participation in ownership and trading.
The people doing all of the hyping up not understanding the tech is why I find all of this so amusing.
> Steam does that without a blockchain, albeit not for real money.
FYI you can buy in game items for real money on their market [1]
[1] https://steamcommunity.com/market/listings/730/AWP%20%7C%20A...
This is the classic "solution looking for a problem" you see so often with NFTs and blockchain generally. The proposed problems (in this case verifiable and transferable ownership) already have mature, satisfactory solutions.
NFTs don't benefit consumers (because the tangible value exists in a centralized server somewhere anyway) and they don't benefit publishers (who can already implement those features if they cared to). They benefit people that want to get rich speculating on NFTs.
How does the game developer benefit from outsourcing their inventory management system like that?
What if they release an in-game item that turns out to be completely over-powered and want to change or remove it?
(Amusingly enough the original inspiration for Ethereum was that Vitalik Buterin hated that his warlock got nerfed: https://www.polygon.com/22709126/ethereum-creator-world-of-w... )
I'm not sure how/if real "crypto games" do it, but it wouldn't be impossible to have a list of "invalid" items the smart contract references that can't be used unless you use a second contract the developer set up to exchange them for the nerfed version. And I guess that could enable community-created formats with their own banlists (if the game is actually decentralized enough for that to be possible).
But then we've had to do a lot of extra work for a messy version of what we can already do with a normal database!
Why should I care about how a third party in the transaction feels?
> What if they release an in-game item that turns out to be completely over-powered and want to change or remove it?
Then they can do that. A token being associated with a wallet is orthogonal to an item being rendered or used in a game.
In short, publishers aren’t going to give the crazy margins they make on digital in-game items to a third party NFT blockchain, they’d be insane to do so.