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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

#131

Post by Vespasian »

charcircuit wrote: post #123
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.

>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.

As a dev, what would be my motivation to support items from other games in my own game.

It seems like I would focus on creating items myself and selling them to players, since I can't profit from them otherwise.

Unless there is an after sales market I (and anybody else) am incentiviced to reduce the inflow of external NFTs as much as possible.

If I'm developing a game that has value by itself (aka is fun) it's very unlikely that players would put enough pressure on me to care (they could do that now without crypto but so far it didn't happen. Would be much easier and cheaper to implement).

If players are in it for the financial gain, I'm not really developing a game after all.

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

#132

Post by andrepd »

andreareina wrote: post #86
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…

I like Path of Exile for having an explicit Solo Self Found mode. Unfortunately they seem to be on a path of making top-end gear pretty much required, which just pushes out the casuals. Good chance I'll be sitting the next league out.

Oldschool Runescape has ironman mode as well

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

#133

Post by meheleventyone »

rl3 wrote: post #103
spywaregorilla wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-mon…

EVE is a bit different as the RMT side of things isn't intentional and combatted by CCP. Taking part can and does get people banned from the game.

The dollar to ISK conversion comes from the sale of PLEX (https://secure.eveonline.com/plex) which was initially just a way to let people buy ISK by selling game time vouchers to in-game wealthy people. Essentially people were buying money from time rich players who then didn't have to pay to play the game. Now it's a bit more complex and MTX based as CCP have tried a few things to reinvigorate the player base.

But the key difference is that you can put real money in and get ISK but there is no legitimate way to take it back out again. So there is no capital gain and so on and the money you "lose" was already intentionally spent in that knowledge rather than being an investment it would be possible to recoup on and taking part in that eco-system is voluntary rather than mandatory.

(Disclaimer: I worked on EVE for four years quite a while ago.)

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

#134

Post by whoami_nr »

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…

While it is actually ridiculous for the games you mentioned, it makes sense for certain FPS/Racing games. Plus, common asset sharing isn't the only thing. Distributed infra for certain cross game modules also make a lot of sense. I wrote[1] a small post summarizing all possible use cases of putting game assets/game itself on-chain.

[1]https://rnikhil.com/2022/06/27/web3-gaming.html

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

#135

Post by pjc50 »

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…

I find it a little hard to believe that they're going to go after all the $10 transactions. But I suppose if you can do a $10 transaction as many times as you like, you can launder as much money as you want.

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

#136

Post by yunohn »

mattdesl wrote: post #70

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),…

> The primary benefit here is minimizing the 2-30% take-rates of current intermediaries

Why would said intermediaries spend R&D time and money implementing a system that reduces their take rate??

> to set rules in smart contracts

Why exactly does this need to run on a generic chain like ETH with unnecessary overhead and fees, to function?

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

#137

Post by malermeister »

charcircuit wrote: post #128
malermeister wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would I buy something that just shows up as a png in some menu?

Why would I accept a car bought in some other game as a developer trying to make money?

How would that even work? Need for speed and Forza for example have dramatically different driving models. Does sharing stats between those even make sense?

What about licensing deals? Money exchanges hands when real life brands are used in games. Not sure they'd be thrilled about some random other game using it all of a sudden.

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

#138

Post by malermeister »

charcircuit wrote: post #126
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…

>"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 we…

And Activision and EA would agree to this why exactly?

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

#139

Post by PeterisP »

eli wrote: post #25
Judgmentality wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically blockchain is going to coincidentally solve a problem that it's not explicitly needed for? Honestly I can see this happening, but regardless of it being blockchain or a vanilla API it's worthless without everybody (game developers, game publishers, gamers, marketplace owners) agreeing to work on it together. The assets only have value if they're portable, and they're only portable if everybody agrees the…

My question is: is this even a problem worth trying to solve? How much more will customers pay for a skin that works in multiple games (assuming that's possible)?

> How much more will customers pay for a skin that works in multiple games

The bigger question is to whom will customers pay for a skin that works in multiple games.

If they'll pay to the first game where they bought that skin, then that's a strong incentive for most games to prevent this from working and avoid or disrupt the ecosystem, because they would rather have the player re-buy the same skin on their platform (i.e. "this thing will allow free transfer of skins from A to B" is a property that works against the proposal, not for it)

If they'll pay to every game, then the blockchain solution needs to solve that very difficult problem of revenue allocation between all the stakeholders, ensuring that every company involved feels certain that they'll be able to extract a revenue stream from the process, instead of being permissionless, full ownership of your items, etc.

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

#140

Post by malermeister »

baby wrote: post #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 no…

I feel like more monetization is the opposite of what the internet needs.

This might just be "old man yelling at cloud" stuff, but to me the "best time" in the internet was when people were just using it to genuinely share their weird interests, before monetization came along and ruined it.

I'd rather not have monetization ruin more stuff. Why does everything always have to be commercialized?

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