Among all the harebrained Web3 ideas I've heard, Web3 gaming takes the cake as the least sensible. Instead of commoditizing its complements (GPUs), it makes them inaccessible.
Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit
101–110 of 180 posts
Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit
#102Crypto “web3” is a world where the only real and good thing is day trading, and the center of everyone’s life is a stock trading UI. Everything else is a pale reflection of the objects that can be day traded: games and art now exist to support the day trading nirvana, not the other way around.
It’s understandable that this world seems appealing to venture capitalists and others whose lives revolve around finance. It’s completely unclear why anyone else should want it.
Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit
#103In 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…
> 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. More likely is you go out and encounter someone with a $600 ship an…
>More likely is you go out and encounter someone with a $600 ship and you lose $60. This is so much more insidious than pay to win games. This is paying to steal other people's money, and is going to be quickly optimized by anyone if there's actual profit volume to be captured.
EVE Online already sort of worked like this a decade ago. It wasn't blockchain, but in-game currency was heavily laundered for RMT (real-money trading) purposes, and eventually became real money—largely via way of sales to casual players looking for a leg up.
What you'd end up with is these elaborate power structures, with elite players at the top who would fly ships worth thousands each (supercapitals). These ships would typically comprise their own fleet elements, with separate comms, intel and command structure. A single Titan used to be worth about $10,000 USD, but by the time B-R5RB happened, that was no longer the case.
"Total forces involved 7,548 participants. Damages amounted to an approximate real-currency value of $300,000-330,000 USD." [0]
All of this was for control of territory called soverign nullsec space or 0.0, which would reap massive amounts of profit for whoever controlled it. These profits owed to the mining of rare elements on planetary moons that were later sold, which in turn drove a large portion of the game's economy.
Leaders of these power blocs had crazy opportunities laid before them to turn their in-game wealth into real wealth. External gambling sites using in-game currency were huge for a while, and were probably central to some laundering operations.
Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit
#104It's just the same usual blockchain problem over again. The blockchain part itself that allows some token that you can trade around, that's well established. The part where that bridges the gap over into something real or useful (even something that's already very digital like a video game skin) is where it all collapses. The usual problem type I seem to see is something along the lines of: "to make this work, you ne…
This thing you are talking about is called the oracle problem.
The solution to it is to move away from centrally coordinated definitions. This also means central currencies built on on a decentralized computation of some kind (i.e. blockchains).
You can see why that is not compatible with the narrative coming from the sky... there'd be no safe store of value.. how to become rich with no metric?
Question is (for me at least) who is going to be the first giant to betray the current economic system as the real world collapse becomes too obvious to ignore (hint: they'll probably be actually competent).
Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit
#105In 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…
thats +1 realism and -1 kiddie friendliness
Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit
#106Maybe "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…
The thing is; people can clearly see that the internet is going to be the foundation of our societal communication infrastructures (such as money, politics and other governance). Therefore technologies that enable that are somewhat inevitable... it's just all done in such bad faith that it leaves us reeling.
Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit
#107In 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 hav…
It's true for the blockchain game because all blockchain transactions are taxable events. If you purchase crypto from an American exchange and transfer it to your wallet, the IRS will know your address. Even if all you do is play games, the IRS will know your address and validate you reported it on your taxes. The chain is public.
Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit
#108For years I played Team Fortress 2, where everyone was so proud of the hilarious hats we'd collect from achievements and special events. In retrospect, I can see that we weren't actually having fun, because those hats were not stored in a permanent blockchain.
It's OK,justin kan's here to save you
Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit
#109For years I played Team Fortress 2, where everyone was so proud of the hilarious hats we'd collect from achievements and special events. In retrospect, I can see that we weren't actually having fun, because those hats were not stored in a permanent blockchain.
I've been playing that game since the beta and never bought into the whole vanity thing. Hats almost completely ruined the game and even today half the community servers are just drop grounds for vullshit items.
Re: Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit
#110Every time I read web3, I get a little taste of vomit in my mouth.
Let me ask you this, if this wasn't complete farts, why would you need to call it 'web3 games'?
What do games have to do with the web, and the so called "future of the web"?
Games provide value through entertainment. They can have a line connection to other people but it's not the premise.
“I think the idea of creating digital assets, and then taxing everyone for all the transactions around them is a good model,” Kan said.
Here is the reality... Huge amount of excitement and false tales of freedom being meddled into just about anything they can, for the benefit of snake oil artists.