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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

#91

Post by SkyMarshal »

kodah wrote: post #5
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…

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.

Is this even viable? Can a skin from say an Unreal engine game be copied over to and used in a Unity engine game?

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

#92

Post by runako »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #91
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. Is this even viable? Can a skin from say an Unreal engine game be copied over to and used in a Unity engine game?

Disclaimer: I'm not a game dev.

The technical problem is probably the smaller issue. The larger issue is that the publishers of the respective games have to allow this type of cross-usage, and they do not have an incentive to make their games interoperable with other games.

Even in business software, where there are practical incentives to interop, compatibility at the level of asset sharing remains very rare.

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

#93

Post by Animats »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #91
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. Is this even viable? Can a skin from say an Unreal engine game be copied over to and used in a Unity engine game?

> Can a skin from say an Unreal engine game be copied over to and used in a Unity engine game?

With difficulty, yes. If you have the asset in the creator tools, rather than just inside the game as a game user, it's straightforward. There's some standardization in this area, and it's getting better. There are now open formats. Look up "GLTF" and "USD" formats. Until about two years ago, most content was interchanged in proprietary formats, but we're now past that. The Khronos Group, which standardized Vulkan, is behind this standardization effort.

Currently, you can usually move rigid objects from one platform to another, but articulated skeletons and scripted objects need manual rework to port.

"Ripping" models from games is a thing. There are tools.

NFTs do not enable asset portability. They are part of a DRM system. The goal of the DRM is to prevent more asset portability than someone wants. This only works if the receiving system pays attention to the DRM. There's no technical obstacle right now to finding the JPEG for a Bored Ape Yacht Club and printing it as a poster for your wall. But you won't be able to mint it as a new NFT and sell it on OpenSea, because OpenSea checks.

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

#94

Post by egypturnash »

djur wrote: post #34
eli wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

Hell, what about skins/etc that already have a licensing agreement? If I buy a Star Wars skin for Fortnite, there’s a bunch of deals Epic’s made with Disney to be allowed to have Darth Vader and friends in their game, as well as a bunch of back-and-forth until Disney’s licensing department has approved of the model and every possible action it can be made to take. If that skin is an NFT that I can theoretically take to Street Fighter, then suddenly Capcom has Darth Vader in there without any deal with Disney, quite possibly doing things the licensing department would never approve of.

(This is of course assuming some theoretical process where the NFT has a bunch of data attached that makes it Just Work, instead of it requiring Capcom to sink a bunch of development time into making assets for characters that can only be unlocked by having paid money to another company entirely.)

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

#95

Post by Animats »

coffee_beqn wrote: post #77
Animats wrote: post #65

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 Fa…

It’s annoying how many people talk about “web3” like it will inevitably become just as popular as the internet is today. The internet is the ultimate outlier. Web3 might just as easily end up as a Tamagotchi or Virtual Boy or Adventure Game or Zip drive or Kazaa or MySpace or Google+ or iPod or LAN party or Google Glass or.. you get the idea. Just because you like a technology and are invested in it doesn’t mean it’l…

I know. I think metaverses are a fun niche, and can grow, but I don't see everyone wearing VR goggles.

AR goggles, as a phone replacement, though... Glassholes 3.0?

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

#96

Post by Nursie »

swalsh wrote: post #56
ryanSrich wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm a crypto guy, I like what it enables. But after using defi for a while, and dealing with the huge tax headaches it has caused me, this was the first thing that came to my mind. 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…

This all sounds ... horrific. I can't understand why anyone would want to play the game you describe, because as soon as you're hooking in actual finance ... what you have now is a job.

And much like with Axie infinity, it's a job that can only keep paying as long as there is either VC capital to burn or an influx of new people willing to pay your salary.

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

#97

Post by 3np »

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…

> There's some capital gains!

Are you really certain of this? Grinding and acquiring valuable inventory in a game is not necessarily the same kind of taxable event as buying/selling/trading.

If so, why would this not be equally true for any digital game (see: any currently active MMO) with currency or items which can be sold between players in the exact same way? See Kaze404's sibling comment.

I'm skeptic that it having blockchain/NFT components really changes anything at all wrt the legal tax situation.

I'd think that in most jurisdictions you could technically incur capital gains through any kind of online game with a secondary market for in-game items but also have minimum thresholds under which reporting is not required ($60 in a year would generally fall under such limits).

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

#98

Post by Nursie »

nl wrote: post #81
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…

> yet we're seeing these highly-respected tech leaders try to convince us that such a brain-dead idea is visionary. Why? Because they stand to make another fortune on it and they have absolutely no problem lying to our faces about it. They are clearly wrong, but I think much of the time they aren't lying so much as ignorant. They aren't gamers, and the logic makes sense to them but they are missing the details that a…

"What do I care about? Making money. It's the focus of my life. Therefore everyone else cares about that too. We should inject external economic motives into games, they're totally gonna eat this up!"

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

#99

Post by Nursie »

throw149102 wrote: post #53

I don't have anything to add except fuck Web3, fuck NFTs, fuck play-to-earn, fuck the blockchain, and fuck anyone supporting this garbage. Gamers despise the cryptocurrency craze that bought up their graphics cards to generate random numbers and will never support it en-mass. Maybe if I have anything to add, it's that gamers already dislike cosmetics without any blockchain nonsense. Cosmetics hurt esports and other c…

That is a good point - the PC gaming community in particular hates cryptocurrency with an absolute vengeance because of what's happened with graphics cards, among other things. Anything that goes near crypto, web3, NFTs is instantly disliked and treated with disgust.

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

#100

Post by Nursie »

carlosdp wrote: post #15

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 qu…

> 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

Erm, no. It really, really doesn't. There's a mass of technical reasons that skins are not easily portable between games already, well beyond the licensing problems.

Sure, you could trade them, but actually using them is a huge technical problem. At an absolute minimum there would have to be some insane sort of asset meta-standard that allowed each game to dynamically apply a skin to diverse 3d models in very different worlds.

As for the rest, it's monetization where gamers usually don't want monetization. What you describe is generally a set of net negatives for gamers.

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