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Crypto’s hottest game is facing an economic maelstrom

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Re: Crypto’s hottest game is facing an economic maelstrom

#121

Post by saganus »

bob29 wrote: post #104
slfnflctd wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or imagine a digital casino I find pretty much every casino game beyond incredibly boring. The only appeal seems to be greed-- if you take that away (or decide you don't value it), they lose all luster for me. I know this opinion isn't universal - some people will play simulations of those games for hours with no real money on the line - but I can't be the only one. There are so many much more enjoyable games out t…

The more modern digital screen slot machines I've played now have 2 buttons, one that selects how many paylines, and one that selects how much money per payline you bet, and have rewards that can trigger minigames. I wouldn't say they're more engaging or fundamentally different than classic casino games, but I think for casinos there will always be an incentive to design games that can be optimally played by any drun…

> with an in-game integration of marketplace for gold and items instead of going to ebay

That's what happened with Diablo 3's Real Money Action House and... It didn't end well.

They had to convert the RMAH to a regulat AH after some time.

Re: Crypto’s hottest game is facing an economic maelstrom

#122

Post by sailingparrot »

adnzzzzZ wrote: post #94
sailingparrot wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that's actually not how the world works. With traditional company, some consumers are paying it for a service. Apple is making 300B$ a year because a lot of people are willing to partake large amount of money in exchange for some good that they (think they) need such as a laptop or a phone. The consumers have no expectation of getting that money back later, it's a trade. If you think Apple is a good company a…

>Axie is very different, the price of the token only rise because of investors (here players) There are players and investors who actually only buy the token and don't play the game. These are different people. Here the "external" source of money for players would be the investors who don't play the game and for investors it would be players playing the game because they think it's fun. In Axie's case that's probably…

> Here the "external" source of money for players would be the investors who don't play the game and for investors it would be players playing the game because they think it's fun

They are all part of the same system, both the investor and the players buy or get some AXS, and both hope that AXS will go higher so they can make actual $ later on. None of them are putting $ in the system that they do not want to get back later on, which is very different from someone buying an iPhone: they know Apple will never give them that money back. So it's still a 0 sum game, no matter if some people are playing and others aren't.

> Nothing about the setup fundamentally prevents people from spending real money on real games, and from the token's value to increase as a result, like any normal company.

I agree, that's the last part of my comment. But mechanisms need to be put in place for people to spend (and not invest) actual money in the ecosystem, say through advertising, or buying things (that you cannot resell later at a higher value), and the profit needs to be in part redistributed to the community. That's not happening today in Axie, maybe it will eventually, but today it is indeed a Ponzi scheme.

Re: Crypto’s hottest game is facing an economic maelstrom

#123

Post by thunkshift1 »

theptip wrote: post #8

> The number of Axie daily users increased by more than four times in under three months to 2bn in October, according to figures released by Sky Mavis. Analysts have now begun watching for signs of slowing growth. In case anyone else was confused by the 2B DAU figure which would dwarf TikTok by a couple orders of magnitude, this seems to be a typo for 2M. E.g. https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/10/05/axie-infinit…

+1 ..2b is insanely high

Re: Crypto’s hottest game is facing an economic maelstrom

#124

Post by igorkraw »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #120
igorkraw wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm specifically laying into people getting rich off of other people gambling and making a business out of it. If a group of friends wants to play poker, or if the Axie platform was a co-op owned by all of the players (and no 20% dev stake like most premined cryptocurrencies) I'd say "eh, it's their choice". But making money off of hooking into and pushing our vices is something I personally disagree with.

Sure but what about the folks that run casinos, pachinko parlors, mahjongg dens, card clubs, horse race betting owners, claw machine owners, etc, etc. There's a _lot_ of gambling around the world and it's the owners' job to market these gambling houses. Why are these crypto scams so deleterious when there's probably an order of magnitude more people gambling their money away in more traditional gambling houses design…

By the state or by private individuals without profiting and without advertising. I'm also in support of banning loot boxes in commercial games like we've seen in some European countries.

Again, the problem isn't gambling. The problem is people making money off of pushing people to gamble more than they'd do naturally.

Re: Crypto’s hottest game is facing an economic maelstrom

#125

Post by adnzzzzZ »

sailingparrot wrote: post #122
adnzzzzZ wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Axie is very different, the price of the token only rise because of investors (here players) There are players and investors who actually only buy the token and don't play the game. These are different people. Here the "external" source of money for players would be the investors who don't play the game and for investors it would be players playing the game because they think it's fun. In Axie's case that's probably…

> Here the "external" source of money for players would be the investors who don't play the game and for investors it would be players playing the game because they think it's fun They are all part of the same system, both the investor and the players buy or get some AXS, and both hope that AXS will go higher so they can make actual $ later on. None of them are putting $ in the system that they do not want to get bac…

Sorry but I just disagree. A game that is free to play and where every item is bought and can be sold later for a higher price doesn't stop being fun and engaging just because people can sell what they bought when they feel like they don't wanna play anymore. The idea that there absolutely need to be people who are buying things without the intent of ever selling them isn't what would stop from making it a "ponzi scheme". Like I said, people sharing in the success (and failure) of a company's valuation is not a ponzi scheme.

>and the profit needs to be in part redistributed to the community.

This already happens through the token's increase in value. The notion that this redistribution can ONLY happen if there are money sinks in the system is misguided and old fashioned.

Re: Crypto’s hottest game is facing an economic maelstrom

#126

Post by dageshi »

acdha wrote: post #102
dageshi wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not involved in nor have I ever bought anything crypto related. But I'll say this for it, it's the most interesting new tech to hit the internet in the past couple decades. Everything else has been pretty incremental over that time period, crypto is something really new and I suspect that's why its adherents are so obsessed by it.

Bigger than VR/AR, IoT, AI or smartphones? Chaum was talking about digital currency around the dawn of the web so I’m not sure you could say there’s been anything much less incremental there. The thing to remember is that by now we’ve had over a decade of people making very big, obviously unfounded claims and failing to deliver much of anything. The people in that space trying to recoup their investment even felt the…

I suppose I should clarify what I mean. I mean crypto is maybe the most interesting new "protocol" type thing to use the internet in a new and different way.

We used to have lots of protocols that did different things but nowadays a lot of it has mostly been subsumed into http and we've been making and serving incrementally better (or worse depending on your perspective) websites for a couple decades plus now. If you talk to someone about the internet now, the default assumption is WWW, it's that dominant.

The last technology I think I would say was really different, interesting and widely used over the net is probably bittorrent? But even there http sites have gradually chipped away at a lot of the use cases it had.

Crypto is the first really new, interesting and actually popular "protocol" type thing to hit the internet since maybe bittorrent?

Personally I wouldn't put a penny into it because I really don't understand it, BUT if you told me in another 10 years crypto had significantly changed the world I wouldn't be surprised either, internet protocols have the power to do that, HTTP did.

Re: Crypto’s hottest game is facing an economic maelstrom

#127

Post by iamevn »

adnzzzzZ wrote: post #125
sailingparrot wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here the "external" source of money for players would be the investors who don't play the game and for investors it would be players playing the game because they think it's fun They are all part of the same system, both the investor and the players buy or get some AXS, and both hope that AXS will go higher so they can make actual $ later on. None of them are putting $ in the system that they do not want to get bac…

Sorry but I just disagree. A game that is free to play and where every item is bought and can be sold later for a higher price doesn't stop being fun and engaging just because people can sell what they bought when they feel like they don't wanna play anymore. The idea that there absolutely need to be people who are buying things without the intent of ever selling them isn't what would stop from making it a "ponzi sch…

How is the token increasing in value outside of people speculating on it? The only money entering the system is investors and fees drain that out of the system. Without people spending, not investing, the system is doomed to hurt people who are left holding tokens when everyone else has cashed out.

Re: Crypto’s hottest game is facing an economic maelstrom

#128

Post by dom96 »

karmicthreat wrote: post #61
dom96 wrote: post #59

Every time I hear about this I am reminded of this strategy game I once played in ~2008. It was a strategy game and it promised to pay you money if you were able to capture certain territory. I cannot for the life of me remember it's name though, anyone recall something like this?

Project Entropia? I guess it's Entropia Universe now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropia_Universe

Nope, it was a far more simple 2D game from what I recall.

Re: Crypto’s hottest game is facing an economic maelstrom

#129

Post by zenplant »

igorkraw wrote: post #117
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not every person or every culture has the same sets of values around gambling. Not every ethical philosophy thinks of gambling the same way. In many developed countries gambling is legal and regulated in many forms. Governments around the world spend a lot of energy deciding what the lines for regulating gambling is. When I see ethical takes like this, I feel like I'm missing a _lot_ of context. The Islamic world for…

Answering directly to your questions, I don't have any religious background on this, I just see hijacking of our primitive vices for personal profit as immoral and shun-worthy. I think prohibition is bad (just creates Shadow markets) and the main thing to stop is running profitable gambling houses and advertising/incitement - if nobody could make a profit off of it, people would still gamble, but at least it would be…

Hijacking of our primitive vices, isn't that the basis for most economic activity? The food industry, television/movie industry, all of social media including the site we're on right now, the list goes on indefinitely.

Normal video games without a crypto element do this as well. I currently have real money tokens in at least 4 of the most popular games, none of which I can ever get anything back from except in game cosmetics. But even games like Stardew Valley that wouldn't dream of taking extra money from you are tapping into our vice centers to keep us playing.

As someone deep into video games to me this is just an evolution of world of warcraft gold, or what steam has going on with their in game items and trading cards. I can exchange wow gold/steam items for real money, which blizzard or valve takes a generous % of. I can then only use that money to buy blizzard/steam products from their respective stores. People grind for countless hours in games even for these relatively worthless (when compared to crypto/nfts) currencies. Hell people spend countless hours grinding for in game currencies that will never have any real world value at all. Mostly because it can be wildly fun to do.

I feel like a whole lot of the hatred towards the crypto space will go down in history as an old man yells at cloud moment.

Re: Crypto’s hottest game is facing an economic maelstrom

#130

Post by gandalfgreybeer »

timmg wrote: post #95

From a big-picture perspective: people quitting jobs to "grind" through a game to "win" tokens makes no sense. There is literally no productive value from it. I don't understand how it can be anything other than a ponzi scheme. Playing games as entertainment is totally fine (and worthwhile). But if people in poor countries are quitting jobs to do this -- to "make money" -- it is a real tragedy.

Only tangentially-related but this reminds me of something interesting I encountered since Venezuelans playing RuneScape to farm gold since that currency was more stable than their irl currency

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1018915121

More related, I’m from one of those countries where people are doing that and it is truly a tragedy but it’s not as widespread (at least in my bubble). But the thing is, a lot of people quit jobs for “get rich quick” schemes here and this is just the latest chapter of that tragedy.

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