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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

#261

Post by Gigachad »

everfree wrote: post #178
chris_wot wrote: post #160

So basically, as Ethereum gets more popular, the price of gas goes up. Eventually the cost of making a transaction will often become higher than the transaction itself, all of which you have no control over because it is all determined by how many people are using Ethereum. If true, this seems insane.

What seems insane to you about using an auction model to efficiently price a scarce resource? (The auction model is the transaction fee bidding market, the scarce resource is block space until/unless Ethereum scales.) If you're sidelined by the market because resources are being used by people who feel they have a greater need for them than you (who bid higher), that's an efficient market. It's no different than bein…

Ok, I’ll keep using the credit card and traditional banking system where I don’t need to enter an auction and pay $20 to make a transaction.

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

#262

Post by erwinh »

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…

Yeah lots of “cart before the horse” happening in this space. When talking about games these days we often imagine rich engaging audio/visual interactive experiences. The crypto people don’t really seem to understand that kind of game.

But there are also more turn-based games which really are about the mechanics of which items/stats/buildings/lands you have, what their effects are, how to level up etc which all could be encoded in the chain. Its not a mainstream gaming format but thats where crypto ‘gaming’ could provide a new kind of experience. Although I would say the term on-chain game is more specific. The “game” could become as much about finding tools that give you an edge in accessing and navigating the on-chain data from yourself and other ‘players’. The genre is then competitive turn-based strategy with a turn timer (block time). I would compare it to playing competitive Civilisation with full map vision and real cash rewards. Which isn’t really mainstream gaming atm although I’m sure there is a minor audience for it, but for now I expect real on-chain gaming to stay pretty niche.

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

#263

Post by everfree »

Gigachad wrote: post #261
everfree wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What seems insane to you about using an auction model to efficiently price a scarce resource? (The auction model is the transaction fee bidding market, the scarce resource is block space until/unless Ethereum scales.) If you're sidelined by the market because resources are being used by people who feel they have a greater need for them than you (who bid higher), that's an efficient market. It's no different than bein…

Ok, I’ll keep using the credit card and traditional banking system where I don’t need to enter an auction and pay $20 to make a transaction.

This is such a weird flex, I don't understand what you're trying to say. Continue not purchasing things you don't get value out of, I guess? Good for you.

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

#264

Post by themoonisachees »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #252
naet wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check https://www.cryptokitties.co/guide/ways-to-play The reason it seems like they didn't describe the "actual game" is that there is no actual "gameplay". You just pay to collect cats. You can trade the cat tokens with other people, try to sell them on the marketplace, pay to generate semi randomized new cat tokens via "breeding", and... just have them under your wallet / name. There is no action, no RPG, no platfo…

Back in 2002 I used to hang out in Yahoo pool rooms. I was in a league even. At the time a lot of people in there were cracking Yahoo rares. Names that you can't make as username anymore. Most coveted were ones with capitals, special characters, underscores at the beginning. People bought and sold those for thousands of dollars. That made more sense to me than these crypto games. Those were at least something scarce…

You might be interested in minecraft name trading. Much of the same things ring familiar with what you said

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

#266

Post by Hamuko »

astrange wrote: post #245
yw3410 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Fate series which later spawned a massive franchise (multiple games, movies and books) started off as an eroge.

It doesn't have a whole lot more sex than your average fantasy novel, and like your average fantasy novel it's also an extremely long retelling of the author's tabletop game. (Fate somehow has exactly the same magic system as White Wolf Mage even though it's too old to have copied it. Not sure how that happened.)

>It doesn't have a whole lot more sex than your average fantasy novel

The all-ages versions of Fate also remove all of the sex with minimal effect on the story.

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

#268

Post by kareemsabri »

everfree wrote: post #178
chris_wot wrote: post #160

So basically, as Ethereum gets more popular, the price of gas goes up. Eventually the cost of making a transaction will often become higher than the transaction itself, all of which you have no control over because it is all determined by how many people are using Ethereum. If true, this seems insane.

What seems insane to you about using an auction model to efficiently price a scarce resource? (The auction model is the transaction fee bidding market, the scarce resource is block space until/unless Ethereum scales.) If you're sidelined by the market because resources are being used by people who feel they have a greater need for them than you (who bid higher), that's an efficient market. It's no different than bein…

Insane is a strong word. But your description ("efficiently price a scarce resource") is economics textbook language and irrelevant to the end consumer. What's "insane" about a currency where on any given day the effective purchase price of goods can fluctuate by 100x (from $5 gas fee to $500) is that it's not a usable medium of exchange. As a consumer I need price stability. Getting "priced out" of buying a t-shirt, or playing a game, and whatever other thing I want to buy (or sell), is an inconvenience that would cause me to just use a network with sufficient capacity to never be "scarce".

The resource I want isn't "block verification". That's Ethereum's problem, not mine. I want the thing I'm trying to buy. So I disagree the market is efficient, there's a tax on goods unrelated to the good in question, and I would use Visa to avoid it, as the other poster said in what you call a "weird flex".

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

#269

Post by MrPatan »

thrown_22 wrote: post #206
eaurouge wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The obvious question would be why do you hate it so much. I can't recall the viability of any piece of technology affecting me so negatively. We create technology to solve problems. Even if you can't think of a reason why some technology should exist, I can't imagine why it should elicit such strong emotions.

The CO2 footprint for one.

(Pssst, you're supposed to move the goalposts to "inequality")

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

#270

Post by ETH_start »

dragonwriter wrote: post #246
ETH_start wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The collectibles WotC issues could be much more valuable if they are issued on the blockchain where both exchangeability and access to provenance are guaranteed.

But WotC doesn't want them to be more valuable, it wants to be able to capture more value from them. These are not equivalent goals. And this is one of the big things with many of the apps crypto promoters wave around that are about big incumbents adopting crypto: they implicitlt require those incumbents being motivated to create value that people invested in crypto infrastructure (the exact for depending on the part…

Ceteris paribus, WotC can capture more value when the collectibles it issues are more valuable. It can sell them at a higher initial price.

Whether post-issuance value capture is sufficiently increased by controlling the platform to compensate for the lower market value those assets can command can be argued of course, but I intuit it is not.

As it is WotC captures almost no value from secondary market exchanges of its physical collectibles. I don't see why the prospect of creating a valuable secondary market for its digital collectibles, where it is the sole seller in the primary market, wouldn't be a more attractive prospect for it than trying to create a digital walled garden where there would be significant OPEX costs and no assurance of market demand.

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