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The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

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Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#141

Post by AgentME »

Kerbonut wrote: post #128
cowtools wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I guess, but grinding/mining is not sybil proof. So the only thing that cryptocurrency improves is replacing that with buying and trading items with actual money, or mining stuff with PoW. You couldn't have a blockchain equivalent of World-of-Warcraft. You have no meaningful way to testify that you recieve an item from killing a boss, for example. The only thing you can really implement with cryptocurrency is a…

Game boss dies, triggers a web3 call which mints the NFT. What’s the problem?

Having a regular commercial centralized game with decentralized NFT items is an awkward halfway point that doesn't get you the full benefits of decentralization.

If the game itself is decentralized too, that changes things, but it's unclear if it's possible to make a game like WoW like that.

Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#142

Post by yesimahuman »

saurik wrote: post #126
mkaic wrote: post #87

> What Went Wrong? It's in the title of the article. It's a "Blockchain Game". That's what went wrong. It was a flawed concept from its inception. Blockchains are pretty cool from a math/cryptography standpoint, but they really do not provide added value in most areas people try to apply them to. CryptoKitties is a digital trading card game. You get cards, you can "breed" cards together to make new cards, you trade/b…

In the real world, people play trading card games all the time and a big part of the ecosystem is trading the trading cards. Only, it is really annoying to have to ship around and maintain physical cards, and I want my card collection in the cloud. Some people would thereby prefer to play an online version of, say, Magic: The Gathering, or whatever the Pokémon one is called, etc. The problem now is... how do you do t…

I think the argument that Ethereum/etc provide useful off-the-shelf APIs/services for implementing something like this might be the one point in their favor

Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#143

Post by conscion »

klodolph wrote: post #29
simsla wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that always the case? My friend was talking about a rare Magic The Gathering card being worth a silly amount of money... Except the card had only been sold once or twice at that price. Unless you have enough comparable items (e.g. paintings by the Dutch masters) it's really difficult to determine the value of something that's rarely sold.

Funny you should mention MtG, since the first big crypto exchange collapse was MtGox. I always thought it was "Mt. Gox", like a mountain of sorts. Turns out it's Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange. Edit: MtG seems like it has some kind of evergreen popularity, and various format changes, changes in the list of banned cards, reprints, and changes in the metagame will mean that prices of individual cards can vary wil…

This is only half true. From Wikipedia [1], the name did originally stand for Magic The Gathering Online eXchange, but the domain was only used for that purpose for a couple months in 2007.

When it launched as a Bitcoin exchange in 2010, the unused domain was "Mt. Gox" from the beginning.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox#Founding_(2006%E2%80...

Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#144

Post by hgsgm »

midislack wrote: post #98
digitaLandscape wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You breed them. It reminded me of horse breeding games my girlfriend used to play. Kind of fun. Not worth the ongoing cost though.

For me it's the Mary Kate and Ashley horse breeding game on the Game Boy Color.

No post body was provided.

Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#145

Post by hgsgm »

TomGullen wrote: post #114
secretsatan wrote: post #45

I read these articles sometimes about crypto games, but they all never seem to describe the actual game, it’s like crypto is the primary concern, and game is secondary, and i’m getting the distinct impression none of these games are any fun and everyone in the space has to avoid mentioning it. I think that the people writing these things only have a very slim grasp of gaming, but they know it would be a good market t…

Gamer sentiment is generally very anti micro transactions, all the crypto games I’ve seen so far are micro transactions front and centre on steroids

No post body was provided.

Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#146

Post by sumeno »

alanfalcon wrote: post #58
secretsatan wrote: post #45

I read these articles sometimes about crypto games, but they all never seem to describe the actual game, it’s like crypto is the primary concern, and game is secondary, and i’m getting the distinct impression none of these games are any fun and everyone in the space has to avoid mentioning it. I think that the people writing these things only have a very slim grasp of gaming, but they know it would be a good market t…

CryptoKitties is a lot of fun, for what it is. It's super deep and while it's more of a sandbox than a typical game, I became obsessed with it when it came out, though not for monetary reasons (if it has one huge drawback as a game, it's always been how much it costs IMO). Became so obsessed that I ended up hired by Dapper Labs and working on the CryptoKitties team, later helped design and launch NBA Top Shot on Flow…

Color me surprised that the person claiming to have enjoyed a crypto game is trying to shill a different crypto game

Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#147

Post by cowtools »

lmm wrote: post #127
cowtools wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I guess, but grinding/mining is not sybil proof. So the only thing that cryptocurrency improves is replacing that with buying and trading items with actual money, or mining stuff with PoW. You couldn't have a blockchain equivalent of World-of-Warcraft. You have no meaningful way to testify that you recieve an item from killing a boss, for example. The only thing you can really implement with cryptocurrency is a…

> You have no meaningful way to testify that you recieve an item from killing a boss, for example. Surely you could have a smart contract that implements that (and, in the extreme case, I guess you submit the random seed for this boss fight and a hash of the button inputs you used or something - of course there's no way to stop you using a bot to automate pressing the buttons at the right time, but that applies to re…

I have considered this already. That does not solve anything here, for the reasons you have mentioned yourself.

To the extent that it is broken in world-of-warcraft, it will be more broken here because there will be fees associated with playing, so players will be incentivised to make the most of their money by cheating and trying to optimize the smallest possible "proof".

Eventually, so many people will cheat that the actual game is considered to be a minor nusance. It's like TF2 idle servers. You incentivise players to not play the game.

Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#148

Post by bombcar »

px43 wrote: post #125
bombcar wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be a puzzle with a built in score and fun, but rarely are these direct-to-cash games fun. D3 got much better when the real money auction house closed.

In my opinion, nothing has ever come close to the rich economic system that emerged naturally in Diablo 2. Maybe it just hit me at a good time in my life, towards the end of high school. I spent probably half my time playing that game just doing arbitrage trading. For example a sorceress or necromancer would always give you 4-5 Perfect Skulls for a Stone of Jordan (SOJ) ring, and you could pretty easily buy an SOJ fr…

There was a stable economy time where there weren’t continual “buff patches” dumping more and more items, and it was a good time.

Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#149

Post by bombcar »

csa wrote: post #123
bombcar wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be a puzzle with a built in score and fun, but rarely are these direct-to-cash games fun. D3 got much better when the real money auction house closed.

Very much agreed, but… My favorite AH score was a max stat level 3 chest piece that I sold for $25. That piece was good for 5 or maybe 10 minutes of gameplay at the start of the game. I knew it was a premium piece for that level and type. I knew they didn’t stay on AH long. That said, I didn’t want to compete with all of the lower price point folks, so i set the price to something absurd just to see what happened. I…

People would search by “best I can equip” and you caught a whale.

Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

#150

Post by reidjs »

glitchc wrote: post #96
reidjs wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gambling and gaming are quite interconnected, maybe you can describe it as a spectrum between games and gambling. Free single player games are the 'purest' games, you're only betting that it's worth your time. Cheap single player games, you're still gambling in that you're 'betting' the game is worth your time and $5. Closer to the gambling side are things like Poker, CS Skins, the Diablo Auction House, Eve Online mi…

This is an absurd argument! By that logic buying a book is akin to gambling: You don’t know how good it is until you start reading. Books have nothing in common with gambling except for the books about gambling.

I sort of mixed up risk and gamble in that analogy. I stand by the part that many games fall on a spectrum between “game” and “gamble”. counter strike, wow, eve online are games with a gambling element: loot boxes, skins, etc. Poker is a gamble with a game element, e.g, bluffing. Slot machines aren’t games at all.

I think cryptokitties is somewhere between Poker and Slot machines.

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