Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit
51–60 of 180 posts
Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit
#52The 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 qu…
How does blockchain help with this? The problem isn't that there isn't a record of your purchase on a ledger somewhere, the problem is that the software environment in which your purchase is meaningful is no longer running.
> 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.
Your "much more straightforward idea" can be summarized as "use them to make money".
Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit
#53Maybe if I have anything to add, it's that gamers already dislike cosmetics without any blockchain nonsense. Cosmetics hurt esports and other competitive gaming by messing with the trained instincts around color/silhouette, and thats before we talk about any actual pay to win mechanics.
Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit
#54The usual problem type I seem to see is something along the lines of: "to make this work, you need to introduce some trusted party, and then if you're going to trust them anyway you might as well have just had them run a database." For games the more salient point is that to have your "cross-game transferable items" system work, you need buy-in from the developers, who generally all already have jealously-guarded disconnected microtransaction systems that they're making enormous profits off of and they're not really incentivized at all to let other people play in their sandbox. Let's ignore for the time being the mechanics of actually making cross-game, cross-engine, cross-genre items work at all in the first place.
The hope for proponents would seem to be to jump-start the ecosystem in games they create and create a groundswell of gamers who demand that big titles work with the blockchain system, but that just doesn't seem realistic for a variety of reasons. Even within the hypothetical universe of NFT-ized games, the same kinds of incentives (and technical issues) are likely to throw up similar barriers to interoperability between different games.
Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit
#55In theory, I actually like the idea of games connected to the blockchain. The issue is, now your little funtime activity has serious tax implications. Imagine this, there's a neat little space pirates game. You buy an NFT ship, you buy some space missles, some fuel, contract a crew, and you go out. Maybe the dollar cost of all this was $60. Cool. You go out, you blow up the first ship you found. You spent 3 missles a…
Taxes are the least soul-sucking aspect of this. I've spent an unreasonable amount of my life playing MMOs, especially the Korean ones, where most of the time the goal is to make (in game) money to get strong enough to take on the next piece of content. This is fun because it works like a version of capitalism without, well, everything else. Seeing numbers go up is fun, be it my character's Critical Damage or the fun…
Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit
#56In theory, I actually like the idea of games connected to the blockchain. The issue is, now your little funtime activity has serious tax implications. Imagine this, there's a neat little space pirates game. You buy an NFT ship, you buy some space missles, some fuel, contract a crew, and you go out. Maybe the dollar cost of all this was $60. Cool. You go out, you blow up the first ship you found. You spent 3 missles a…
Yep. This isn’t some harmless thing you can just not report either. If the current administration has shown anything, it’s that they’re fully bought into finding every single tax dollar they can, even if it means hiring 100s of thousands of IRS workers. Your only hope in this situation is some tax software add on for the game. I’ve used current crypto tax software, and it’s a complete joke. You might as well just ass…
If you're building a web3 game, and you don't offer a tool to export your in-game transactions to an easily importable turbotax format. US players can't play it.
But the problem is more complicated, everything in crypto is composable. So I could build a business off in-game assets, and the tool creator might have no clue that exists. So for example, in my space game example.... I might be able to use my minerals as collateral for a loan to buy another space ship. That loan might exist on a platform not developed by the game developers, and if it was the game devs that built the tax tool you're using... it might not properly capture that event. Maybe another platform offers insurance on that ship, and I need to pay a premium. The tool might not caputre THAT. The posssibilities for building a really cool space game are infinite, but these in-game events have real-world tax implications.
Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I'm running Fortnite, I could be convinced that there's a value in allowing Fornite skins/dances/etc. in other games. The much harder sell is that I should allow _unrestricted_ use in other games, rather than making deals with other developers to license my content, as companies already do. An even harder sell is that I should also allow unrestricted use of skins/etc. from other games. I have a strong incentive to…
Why would other games want to allow Fortnite skins in their game? If their players are willing to spend money on skins wouldn't they be better off just selling skins? Nevermind the technical and practical concerns. What does it even mean to apply a Fortnite skin to a battleship or a racecar?
Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit
#58Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit
#59You 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…
Not to mention the technical issues involved in having a truly cross-platform asset. What's the poly and texture count? How is scale represented? Collision volumes? How does it render properly? What file formats do we standardize on? The whole thing is ridiculous. The cynical view would be that this is trying to quickly get retail gamers/"investors" to subsidize VC returns, before the crypto market fully tanks.
Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit
#60The 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 qu…
> 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. How does blockchain help with this? The problem isn't that there isn't a record of your purchase on a ledger somewhere, the problem is that the software environment in which your purchase is m…
The reason that environment no longer runs is because the company decides it's no longer profitable to run it. Blockchains build incentives to run that environment into the operation, so as long as there are users willing to pay, and the environment is efficient enough, in theory the environment should never not be running.
This gets stronger if you share that environment with multiple games.
> Your "much more straightforward idea" can be summarized as "use them to make money".
Playing poker with friends and being able to use any game's purchased assets in that game doesn't have to be about money. It certainly wouldn't be for me, cause I suck at poker.