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Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit

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Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit

#11

Post by cowtools »

dumpsterlid wrote: post #6

Question, how did mobile gaming, a medium of games that runs on devices almost everybody has on them at all times completely destroy consumer confidence in the medium and atrophy innovation and growth in said medium for years and years? The answer? It was full of people like Justin Kan that look into the future of gaming and had such miserable imaginations that all they could envision larger, more predatory monetizat…

I think it comes down to the marketplace. The Apple/Google "app store" allows that model to work, and the consumers don't seem to mind. It is basically the flash games that were popular years ago, but now with immediate access to parents' credit cards.

Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit

#12

Post by loceng »

smt88 wrote: post #2

> “I think the idea of creating digital assets, and then taxing everyone for all the transactions around them is a good model,” Kan said. I don't think he has the slightest idea what players want, because this isn't it. This is exactly what players are raging against: games optimized for the creators' greed, not for the players' enjoyment. It doesn't sound like more fun than an existing game by that description, and…

At its foundation it sounds like rent seeking.

Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit

#13

Post by smt88 »

cinntaile wrote: post #7
smt88 wrote: post #2

> “I think the idea of creating digital assets, and then taxing everyone for all the transactions around them is a good model,” Kan said. I don't think he has the slightest idea what players want, because this isn't it. This is exactly what players are raging against: games optimized for the creators' greed, not for the players' enjoyment. It doesn't sound like more fun than an existing game by that description, and…

Plenty of players happily pay Steam 30% of the sale value of their ingame items.

Web3 and in-game items are completely unrelated. Crypto and Web3 add nothing to in-game items for either developers or players.

Items are inherently centralized and cannot be decentralized because games can choose to stop supporting them.

Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit

#14

Post by s17n »

eli wrote: post #4

Without "luring players with profit" isn't it just a video game? What makes it web3? What features require a blockchain?

this is addressed in the article:

> he admitted that building this interoperable ecosystem, which he sees as the future of video games overall, doesn’t technically require blockchain technology at all.

>

> “Blockchain is just the way that it’s going to happen, I think, because there’s a lot of cultural momentum around people equating blockchain with openness and trusting things that are decentralized on the blockchain.”

(actually I think he's understating the case here, representing ownership is a real use case for blockchains)

Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit

#15

Post by carlosdp »

The whole "play-to-earn" concept isn't actually that popular in web3 builder circles, in my experience. The companies that work on that just spend a ton of money on marketing, and Axie's valuation went so high for a while, that it keeps getting mainstream attention.

I think he's totally right, though I don't think he does a great job of explaining why blockchain tech can be beneficial for gamers. Here's some of my quick thoughts on potential benefits:

- Credibly neutral in-game item marketplaces: I think this will take a long time to get any traction, to be honest, because while these marketplaces are super centralized around Steam (Valve) and Epic today, gamers don't currently face any major issues with those marketplaces.

I think the way this tech takes off is when more marketplaces die because EA decides to start and then kill one, and everyone loses their items they paid money for, because they don't have any sovereignty over their purchase. There is already discomfort among gamers about the current world of DRM, where a game can become unusable because the company decides to shut down a server 5-10 years later.

- Sustainable game server hosting: on that note, it's becoming less common that people are able to host their own servers for multiplayer online games. When you are able to, funding those servers has usually been either donation based, or in the modern day perhaps requiring a Patreon subscription.

Tying in the easy value-moving crypto provides, it is possible to make games that make it really easy for players to "pay" for the servers they use, and smart contracts can be used to coordinate incentivizing and compensating people/services who run servers for those games, in transparent ways and perhaps using value capture that is built into the game (ie. if you buy a hat, maybe a % automatically goes to a fund that pays out to servers you play on).

This could make it possible for game servers to essentially always exist as long as 1 player wants to play it, any time in the future. In other words, we can have the convenience of online games, but with the permanence and resilience of DOOM.

- Interoperability of digital items: when people talk about this, they usually talk about being able to use a gun from one game and bring it into another game. I think that's suuuuupeerrr far off, if a good idea ever at all.

The much more straightforward, and I think cool, idea around this is basically: if your special skins are NFTs, that makes them automatically compatible with any and all apps and protocols that support NFTs out of the box. So you can stake them in an online poker game that supports NFTs, sell them in any NFT marketplace/auction house, and sure, bring it to your metaverse house or whatever and keep it in your virtual house.

Compute-level interoperability is the most powerful aspect of crypto/blockchain, imo.

I also think Justin is wrong about not needing blockchain. I agree that in theory, some other solution could provide the right incentives and interfaces to support this ecosystem of composability and interoperability with native value transfer, but I think you'll just end up re-inventing something that looks kinda like blockchains we have today.

This has also been proven time and time again by new alternative chains that strip off the parts they find "pointless" and expensive, and end up realizing why they need it later.

Overall: Headline is correct, in my opinion, and I think a lot if not most of the web3 builder world is on the same page today. I wouldn't over-index on the other stuff he said, though.

Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit

#16

Post by ohCh6zos »

eli wrote: post #9
kodah wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is that in the short term gamers signal their approval by buying skins, which is what he goes on to talk about later in the article. A metaverse where these skins are transportable game to game. He's trying to analog these outfits to outfits you would buy at a store. Once gamers see how much they've dumped into things that will never produce anything of value, they're a bit ticked. Gamers who know…

> A metaverse where these skins are transportable game to game. I question how desirable that even is. So like some rich kid buys a golden suit and can wear it in a bunch of games...I mean, sure, ok? Not really groundbreaking stuff. Would you buy a game because it lets you do that? Assuming the total cost is the same, I'd just as soon buy different skins in each of my games...assuming I care about skins at all. And t…

I think any developer that implements this would be in between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand it becomes impossible to have a consistent aesthetic or theme if you liberally allow people to bring their own assets, and on the other if you allow it but somehow map resources into your aesthetic the owners will almost certainly feel ripped off.

As a player I think I would find it less than desirable to be playing Darkest Dungeon and view Halo content next to cartoon Fallguys. The NFT owner probably wants more than their NFT transformed into bytes and used as a random seed to determine the grain on their wooden shield. They almost certainly want a direct map to their resource.

Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit

#18

Post by clarle »

eli wrote: post #9
kodah wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is that in the short term gamers signal their approval by buying skins, which is what he goes on to talk about later in the article. A metaverse where these skins are transportable game to game. He's trying to analog these outfits to outfits you would buy at a store. Once gamers see how much they've dumped into things that will never produce anything of value, they're a bit ticked. Gamers who know…

> A metaverse where these skins are transportable game to game. I question how desirable that even is. So like some rich kid buys a golden suit and can wear it in a bunch of games...I mean, sure, ok? Not really groundbreaking stuff. Would you buy a game because it lets you do that? Assuming the total cost is the same, I'd just as soon buy different skins in each of my games...assuming I care about skins at all. And t…

Maybe I'm out of touch these days but I don't see how Web3 in this scenario is also better than just a standardized API schema that's shared across different games or platforms.

The developer still needs to implement how this skin or texture is applied in their specific game, so there's still net additional work per skin or texture. You don't just get it for free as soon as someone else implements it in one game.

Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit

#19

Post by SaltyBackendGuy »

eli wrote: post #9
kodah wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is that in the short term gamers signal their approval by buying skins, which is what he goes on to talk about later in the article. A metaverse where these skins are transportable game to game. He's trying to analog these outfits to outfits you would buy at a store. Once gamers see how much they've dumped into things that will never produce anything of value, they're a bit ticked. Gamers who know…

> A metaverse where these skins are transportable game to game. I question how desirable that even is. So like some rich kid buys a golden suit and can wear it in a bunch of games...I mean, sure, ok? Not really groundbreaking stuff. Would you buy a game because it lets you do that? Assuming the total cost is the same, I'd just as soon buy different skins in each of my games...assuming I care about skins at all. And t…

> I question how desirable that even is

I am with you, but I am a bit more cynical after watching my 6-10 year old nephews get into gaming. All they care about are the skins, it's insane to me but they really like it. Knowing that makes me dislike this angle more because I feel like their entire market vertical will be 6-10 years olds with their parents money. Not to mention the whole, creating addicts out of kids in the name of digital consumerism.

Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit

#20

Post by mark242 »

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

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

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