Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

paulbutler.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 700 posts

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#411

Post by quarterbackrush »

jakemal wrote: post #122
mminer237 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The in-game currency's purpose is to breed new Axies though. If there wasn't increasing demand for Axies, SLP would be worthless.

Is that the only use of the currency or just one possible use?

What ends up happening is the smooth love potion becomes used as transactional currency in Philippines besides being a game currency to purchase Axies. This is not going to be what the government wants and who knows what can happen next, but as you see this automatically gives people a way to transact digitally by using the underlying infrastructure without a fintech company

however price of smooth love potion has been on a downtrend according to the chart https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/smooth-love-potion

the hype is over, and players are mainly selling every tokens they earned whether from the game or through transaction

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#412

Post by tptacek »

emodendroket wrote: post #304
themacguffinman wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I personally agree with your view that gameplay should always be actually fun, I think that misses the magic of games for a significant population of gamers. Is most of your real day-to-day life truly "fun" in a game-like sense? Most people would say "no", X hours in a day is a lot of time to be consistently having fun, yet a lot of people would still describe their lives as "rewarding" and therefore worthwhile…

I can't stand this kind of thing, but I do enjoy a lot of games that basically punish you until you develop enough skill to beat them. This is its own form of "grinding," I suppose, but one I find much more rewarding than essentially being rewarded for the number of hours I'm willing to do monotonous tasks.

The distinction is that you would never pay someone to learn how to beat the Orphan of Kos for you; the pleasure is in getting your ass kicked to the point where you throw the controller across the room, only to pick it up again a couple hours later. That's exactly the experience these Bullshit Games aren't creating.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#413

Post by mgraczyk »

somewhereoutth wrote: post #403
mgraczyk wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money doesn't have to come from anywhere. Sometimes new value is created and the money is brand new. This is how GDP grows. In the case of BTC, it's pretty clear that a huge portion of the market cap didn't come from anywhere. It's new capital. That doesn't mean it can't go to 0 and vanish overnight. But it does mean that play to earn games don't always need money coming in to pay out.

Fiat is created by banks - by originating loans. A bank does not actually need to have that money to create the loan - it is not transferred from somewhere else, it is just that the bank's balance sheet expands. There are rules on how much a bank is allowed to create, as you might imagine. The BTC system does not create money - you can follow the creation of a coin system to its eventual destruction and discover that…

Your description of banks is correct. Your description of BTC is wrong. You're missing an important fact. The price of BTC can, and does, change. When it changes, the market value of all BTC changes. If the value of all BTC goes up, new value (not money) has been created.

Also, lots of people take loans to buy BTC. This is called "leverage".

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#414

Post by mertd »

q-big wrote: post #345
mertd wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that you can pay someone with JPY and that's the whole transaction. When you pay someone in BTC, you also have to pay the power company with something. The system is an inherently leaky bucket.

> When you pay someone in BTC, you also have to pay the power company with something. The system is an inherently leaky bucket. The same holds for, say, transactions in US dollars. Here, you also pay your bank or your credit card company.

That's not a fundamental property of fiat money. There is no fee for exchanging cash.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#415

Post by chii »

dqpb wrote: post #406
Liron wrote: post #250

Here's patio11's thread: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1459682519360491523 I was shocked to see A16z recently investing $150M in Axie Infinity and doubling down on their justification of play-to-earn as a coherent concept, as if it's not fundamentally a pyramid scheme. It's lowered my expectation of what passes for thought leadership in our industry.

Play-to-earn would be a coherent concept if the playing produced something of value. HN is play-to-earn. Except all you earn is worthless non-exchangeable karma.

> playing produced something of value.

some games manage to do this - EVE Online has a play-to-earn model, and those who grind to earn become gameplay elements for other players (the whole game is PVP non-consensually).

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#416

Post by tomrod »

danShumway wrote: post #170
58x14 wrote: post #32

In the late 2000s, as a teenager, I was gifted a Runescape account. This account had level 80+ woodcutting, allowing one to chop magic trees - which would produce the most expensive lumber in the game. It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum. At some point I had realized that there were different sketchy websites that would buy and sell the in…

I know a lot of people have fond memories of this kind of thing, but from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? Runescape set up a system that was so grind-heavy that players broke server rules and wrote automated scripts to grind for them, and other players gave them money to do that. Because the minute-to-minute gameplay of…

> I know a lot of people have fond memories of this kind of thing, but from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it?

From a business perspective, you're allowing for engagement despite different time valuations by player personas. The savvy game designer would not only encourage this, it would develop a way to capture a portion of the proceeds.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#417

Post by mikhmha »

originalvichy wrote: post #139
58x14 wrote: post #32

In the late 2000s, as a teenager, I was gifted a Runescape account. This account had level 80+ woodcutting, allowing one to chop magic trees - which would produce the most expensive lumber in the game. It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum. At some point I had realized that there were different sketchy websites that would buy and sell the in…

I wonder if we’ll have politicians and political philosophers in the near future who will credit MMO games for awakening their keen eye on societal issues. MMO worlds and their economies taught many how the basics of our economy works. As a kid you got exposed to virtual versions of negative aspects of free markets that went against the meritocratic ethos of the game. (Especially if you were one of the kids not permi…

I wonder the same. Played MMOs growing up. Got scolded a lot for wasting time on video games.

But I look back now and realize a lot of my foundational knowledge on economics, programming, networking, teamwork, came from MMORPGS. They are social games where you deal with people - and that is a valuable experience.

Unfortunately modern MMO’s are very asocial games and I don’t think much can be learned from them.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#418

Post by lmm »

mrtksn wrote: post #149
duskwuff wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there a there there without an underlying token that's gone up XX% in the last N months and everyone hopes will still go up XX% in the next N months? Alternatively, even simpler: where is the money coming from ? A bunch of people playing a game are a closed system, and no value is created by playing the game. If the only reason why players are earning money from this game is because more people are continually b…

Where the money was coming from when Facebook, Google, Youtube, Twitter etc were really good places that were free to use? They all were working to "make the world a better place" and not making money as they were burning billions each year, challenging the traditional and profitable companies. With Amazon prices were amazing, you had unlimited rights and not only buying but also selling was great. Bezos was worth qu…

> Where the money was coming from when Facebook, Google, Youtube, Twitter etc were really good places that were free to use? They all were working to "make the world a better place" and not making money as they were burning billions each year, challenging the traditional and profitable companies.

But they were visibly creating value. Seeing what my friends are up to and organising parties together is pleasant. Being able to find what you want on the internet in 1 second rather than 30 minutes is an obvious improvement to your life. So even if they weren't profitable in the short term, you could see that there was legitimate money to be made.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#419

Post by somewhereoutth »

mgraczyk wrote: post #413
somewhereoutth wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fiat is created by banks - by originating loans. A bank does not actually need to have that money to create the loan - it is not transferred from somewhere else, it is just that the bank's balance sheet expands. There are rules on how much a bank is allowed to create, as you might imagine. The BTC system does not create money - you can follow the creation of a coin system to its eventual destruction and discover that…

Your description of banks is correct. Your description of BTC is wrong. You're missing an important fact. The price of BTC can, and does, change. When it changes, the market value of all BTC changes. If the value of all BTC goes up, new value (not money) has been created. Also, lots of people take loans to buy BTC. This is called "leverage".

Ah but a change in the price of BTC does not in fact create any value - it just means that that $100 now corresponds to less BTC. You can profit from that fluctuation, by being on the right side of the cash exchange at two separate points in time. Somebody else will be on the wrong side of that exchange (well, in aggregate anyway - there will be many somebodies on either side) and will suffer a corresponding loss.

Since BTC is intrinsically worthless, any 'price' that might be ascribed to it is meaningless (aside from the profit/loss action described above).

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#420

Post by nightski »

mertd wrote: post #414
q-big wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you pay someone in BTC, you also have to pay the power company with something. The system is an inherently leaky bucket. The same holds for, say, transactions in US dollars. Here, you also pay your bank or your credit card company.

That's not a fundamental property of fiat money. There is no fee for exchanging cash.

The "fee" for fiat is inflation. Your money is regularly losing value even if you do not transact it. Not to mention cash transactions as you describe are on the decline and do not represent the majority of transactions that happen in the U.S.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing by any means, in some ways it is a good thing. Just stating that it exists.

Post reply on HN