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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

#61

Post by [deleted] »

katmannthree wrote: post #37
swalsh wrote: post #33

In 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…

Wow, bravo. That is by far the strongest argument against NFTing games I've heard yet. It feels like it should be obvious and yet I've never seen it before.

[deleted]

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

#62

Post by hakfoo »

kawaiikouhai wrote: post #48
mark242 wrote: post #20

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…

I don't think even the Crypto VCs are approaching this from the angle of making a compelling video game. They don't need to. This is all about creating the next platform for ingame digital consumerism. Think Genshin impact rather than any GoTY title. And the unfortunate thing (for them that is), is that they haven't even figured out how do to that yet. Nobody buys web3 games, and it's been ~2 years. Until they figure…

It's funny, but as someone who's played it for a year, and yes, has spent $20, Genshin has remarkably non-in-your-face monetization. Plenty of games launch where the first screen is a sales pitch, but you actually have to look for it there. It's successful because it's a very well-put-together game experience-- smooth controls, plenty of content, a reasonable level of handholding. You've got to convince people they're actually going to have fun before dropping them in front of a credit card entry form.

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

#63

Post by toofy »

powerhour wrote: post #30
smt88 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Games can stop supporting decentralized items, and if every game you care about does, the item may as well have been centralized to begin with. What's the difference? I'm not asking about the technology, I'm asking about the user experience.

> the item may as well have been centralized to begin with.

that’s exactly the point. this adds nothing new or interesting for any party involved (except the scammer and their marketing people)

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

#64

Post by Kaze404 »

kawaiikouhai wrote: post #55
Kaze404 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hah, did you happen to play Lost Ark at any point this year?

I played it for a bit but the combat felt like it was optimizing for spectacle rather than depth or satisfaction. Diablo III delivered the top-down grindfest fantasy better for me, so all throughout I kept asking myself why I wasn't playing that instead :p

But why do you ask? Did it go this route too? With Amazon money behind it I figured they'd be ruthless in stopping RMT.

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

#65

Post by Animats »

Maybe "Web3" is over.

* 2017 - the year of 3D TV.

* 2019 - the year of VR.

* 2021 - the year of Web3.

Let's check the meme department. Looking at Google Trends (US) for "NFT", "Web3", and "metaverse", they all peaked in late 2021 and are way down since then.

There are still people talking about Decentraland as if it were a big deal.[1] Right now, 401 connected users. Sominium Space is in single digits. Sandbox and Facebook/Meta Horizon don't give out numbers, but they're not huge and are probably shrinking.

I'm very interested in metaverse technology, but it's not coming from the "Web3" crowd. In China, virtual worlds on mobile are big, but they don't involve crypto.

[1] https://decentraland.github.io/catalyst-monitor/

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

#66

Post by game-of-throws »

swalsh wrote: post #33

In 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…

If you were paying taxes, wouldn't this count as income, not capital gains? A programmer doesn't have to deal with capital gains if they buy a laptop and then use it to earn money.

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

#67

Post by malermeister »

duskwuff wrote: post #41
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. We're seeing the startup mentality being applied to generate these new markets within gaming and people just aren't buying it. It's such an intellectually dishonest argument to make that players want to be able to share assets across games as you…

And the closely related concept of being able to transfer functional game items between games, or sell them on the open market, is even more ridiculous. Not only is it completely incompatible with any concept of game balance, but it's really just a roundabout way of saying that every game should be pay-to-win (by buying items outside the game) -- which is a mechanic which most gamers hate.

It's technologically impossible and also straight up makes no sense if you think about it for longer than a second.

Call of Duty should implement all the various potions from World of Warcraft? What does a Mario Kart powerup do in your Halo game?

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

#68

Post by malermeister »

carlosdp wrote: post #60
djur wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. 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…

The problem isn't that the record of you buying a skin is gone.

It's that the entire game is gone and its servers are offline.

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

#69

Post by [deleted] »

game-of-throws wrote: post #66
swalsh wrote: post #33

In 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…

If you were paying taxes, wouldn't this count as income, not capital gains? A programmer doesn't have to deal with capital gains if they buy a laptop and then use it to earn money.

[deleted]

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

#70

Post by mattdesl »

I don’t put much stock into play to earn and current VC funded blockchain games.

There’s two areas of blockchain gaming I think are interesting to explore:

1. Decentralized games like Dark Forest that allow a game developer to set rules in smart contracts, and users to build around that game permissionlessly.[1]

2. A new model for marketplaces, particularly user generated content. This could be for a game (eg: mods), or game engine (eg: unity assets), or just an app (eg: Figma plugins). The primary benefit here is minimizing the 2-30% take-rates of current intermediaries, adding interoperability across ecosystems (such as ownership of an asset across multiple competing app stores), faster settlements, and trustless withdrawals. This is probably another couple years away from happening as it requires robust zkEVM/zkRollup tech and better privacy features, which are currently constrained by computation & regulation. I wrote about this idea here.[2]

[1] https://blog.zkga.me/

[2] https://gist.github.com/mattdesl/ec2bf085b19407695b23cb90f6f...

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