Supporting efficient blockchains for in-game assets, those blockchains with near zero fees, enable (1) robust secondary markets as well as (1) interchangeable assets when desired (such as avatar customizations.) Right now the game industry tends to offer walled garden and fractured solutions here.
In other words, blockchains don’t help at all. The game industry has walled gardens now because that’s what they want and people keep giving them billions of dollars, not because nobody has heard of databases and APIs.
> In other words, blockchains don’t help at all. The game industry has walled gardens now because that’s what they want and people keep giving them billions of dollars, not because nobody has heard of databases and APIs.
I think that offering interoperability will be a benefit for new entrants. Existing players tend to not change their ways very easily.
But I think the potential for game microtransaction revenue can be even larger with robust NFT marketplaces, secondary markets and the potential for interoperability of metaverse assets. There is more money here down this path and thus I think it will happen.
Isn't the main benefit (for the operator) of a walled garden specifically that it keeps new entrants out? Why would any of the big players let some startup NFT company offer interoperable NFTs when they could just as easily do it themselves within the same user database that already exists?
More generally, why would you use a blockchain for such an application at all? If some group of big gaming companies were interested in having in-game assets be transferable between their games, why not start a joint venture that manages the shared database instead of giving all the power away to some group of blockchain devs? That seems like it would have a lot of downsides (exposure to rugpulls, difficult onboarding for users that don't have a wallet yet, etc etc etc) for very little upside, and thus not a thing that company executives would be interested in.
The two big concerns I’d have are the companies’ desires to build up captive audiences (e.g. Ubisoft’s NFT restricted to their system) and the challenges of bootstrapping a marketplace on the idea of interoperability which doesn’t benefit the consumer until multiple companies actually implement it and their fees are known.
It’s a tough sell to pay more upfront in the hopes that it’ll yield results later, and that applies both to the consumers being asked to buy these NFTs and the companies being pitched on implementing them without clear demand.
> It’s a tough sell to pay more upfront in the hopes that it’ll yield results later, and that applies both to the consumers being asked to buy these NFTs and the companies being pitched on implementing them without clear demand.
Integrating third party blockchain microtransaction engines I think will be cheaper than implementing a custom solution for new games. I think it will in the future be viewed akin to adopting Auth0 for authentication rather than rolling your own - it seems cheaper to do it yourself until you want to get for ISO compliance or deal with JWT or SAML or OAuth or 2FA integration, and then you need your own people dealing with bugs, features, and UX designs distracting you from pushing your product's unique features forward.
If you're just treating it as a micropayment system, a hypothetical far more efficient blockchain service could potentially be cheaper than building a pure-custom system but it's unlikely to be easier than Steam/Apple/Google/Stripe/etc. and there's a limited margin for how much cheaper it could be (those players have plenty of room to lower their fees before becoming unprofitable). The problems with micro-transactions aren't really the overhead of processing charges.
The deeper question about this concept is about the idea of interoperability. Payments or authentication are comparatively simple problems which are well-understood. If I use Autho0, I'm cutting out the most expensive part of that problem and my app change are minimal — before I verified that you could receive email at you@example.org myself, now I get that as an attribute from the SSO service, but it's always been my unique identifier.
In contrast, integrating assets into games is a much harder problem without a turnkey solution. Putting an asset into a game requires the artwork, sound, etc. to be adjusted for the game engine (this is far more complicated than just resizing a JPEG since they need to adjust things like 3D meshes, lighting, etc.), custom behaviors implemented (does anything light up or respond to conditions?), if does anything which affects gameplay that has to be implemented and balanced against the rest of the game (you're going to regret paying extra if your favorite weapon is weak; nobody else will want to play if it's over-powered), and while those are substantial amounts of work they're not even the hardest part: the game developer needs to have a license to do any of that. You're not going to see Mario in Call of Duty because Nintendo doesn't want their billion-dollar franchise used that way. Gamers can't even resist advanced purchases for games of unknown quality, there's no chance that they're going to stop buying games until the publishers grant general access to assets or do so at less than usurious rates.
Now, look at it from the perspective of the implementer: if you want to take an asset from game A, you already spent the money buying it in that game. I can spend a lot of time and money licensing & developing support for that asset in my game in the hopes that it'll make you more likely to buy my game but that's a big upfront cost which limits my returns to the person or, hopefully, people who hold that particular NFT — or I can spend that time and money on things which I can sell to everyone, and don't require ongoing licensing fees to the developers of game A.
Ah yeah what a boon to new entrants to have to design games that can accept an infinite number of arbitrary game assets that they will receive no revenue from!
They wouldn't have to give up any major channels of revenue. This would just be an improved architecture for their existing micro transactions, that also enables a secondary market.
Remember that NFT contracts can be written such that the original issuer can get a piece of secondary sales. That is a new revenue stream for the content owners.
I think that interoperability will not be universal, but maybe you can buy NFL gear on an NFL website and then it happens to also work in the licensed NFL games -- stuff like that. Or Nike negotiates with Fortnite and Roblox and Minecraft so that Nike NFTs that you buy from Nike.com work as avatar customizations in these games. I think this is how it starts -- limited and negotiated interoperability between non-competitors. Maybe it gets to where competitor games have interoperability, but that is definitely not where it starts.
I think that interoperability of functional items, rather than apparence items, needs to be careful considered on almost a per-item basis.
There will not be universal interoperability of functional items across disparate games, and only limited interoperability of functional items within game families/series.
Can someone point me to a proposal for how this is even supposed to work, by someone who is familiar with game development? There is no standard for 3D asset development between game studios. Even games made within the same studio don't have interchangeable assets.
