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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

#121
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At its foundation it sounds like rent seeking.

Inducting artificial scarcity to seek rent seems like a parody of capitalism by some 20th century communist. And yet here we are

Video games would be no where as large today if they weren't allowed to introduce artificial scarcity. This is the entire point of copyright law too. Artificial scarcity allows people to monetize their creations.

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

#122
post #98
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!"

>"What do I care about? Making money. It's the focus of my life.

You should've listened then:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18183102#18184642

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

#123
post #13

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.

>Items are inherently centralized

Sure, but web3 gives you access to a giant ecosystem that you can just plug right in to. You can safely create trades including items from multiple games. To say that this ecosystem adds 0 value to me is a stretch.

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

#124
My read on the advances of blockchain is that it allows monetizing everything on the internet. When the internet started the biggest sell was e-commerces. Soon after people started dreaming about tipping blogs and webpages, crowdfunding, donating to projects online, charging a fee on Tor, making people pay to message zuck on fb, send money in whatsapp, etc.

I think it opens a lot of doors, but gaming is definitely not a door I’m excited to open.

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

#125

Instead of using cryptocurrencies to add independence in games why couldn’t a platform like Steam do the same thing? The trading card system is quite close. I have a real hard time understanding on how to use cryptocurrencies to create interoperability when game publishers could do it already or just make a standard API with the games you want to partner with which would probably end up being a competitor to steam. N…

>why couldn’t a platform like Steam do the same thing

It definitely could. But as a society do we want 1 private company deciding how commerce in video games is done and governing its participants and potentially taking a cut from everyone. Web3 supporters think the platform that provides this should be decentralized and not controlled by a single entity.

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

#126
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…

>"So a BF player could use COD skins?"

Something more realistic is can a player trade BF skins for COD skins. There doesn't need to be compatibility built into the game. Just having them as NFTs on the same chain unlocks new possibilities. For example instead of trading a BF player could lock up an expensive skin and borrow some cheaper COD skins to use for a weekend to show off at an esports tournament. After the weekend is over he returns the COD skins and gets his BF skin back.

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

#127
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.

Sound more like an argument against tax system in US

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

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You don't have to do so. You could make them just show up as a png in some menu. Or just not show up in the game at all. There is value in having cross game resources. Take for example a collection of racing simulators which you can import a car to drive around against AI. You could have a standard for staring a model for the car and stats about it that games should use to customize the experience of using it.

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

#129
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…

In what way this game should sound appealing? It's like a normal space game, but now you have to pay 10 dollar to shoot a missile. Doesn't seem very cool

Hearing it this way reminds me of parallels to the real world.

Each modern military war is also an economic war between the belligerents economies to sustain the fighting.

So in a way spending 10$ to shoot a missile and going on "war economy" (aka reducing other activities in your life to fund the game) to keep the war going is quite realistic.

Also that some of your opponents will simply outspend you without breaking a sweat is accurate (see the US support of Ukraine as an example)

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

#130
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…

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.

I think much more likely is the items would be created for each game and you'd just gain access to them.

Otherwise yeah, it'd be an absolute nightmare, like you said.

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