I find no love for games in services like YouTube Gaming or Twitch. They seem to me like nothing more than influencer marketing schemes that use games as bait. It is no wonder, then, that some of their former executives are on the side of promoting NFTs for games. They have no respect for the artistry and creativity that goes into making games, only for the profit and popularity they can extract from them.
What do you think why they phrased it the way they did? Do you think most people reading the headline will think "ah, yes, the people who currently own the Atari brand but are completely detached from what the company that once held the name got famous for are still investing in blockchain tech despite its recent decline" or do you think they will think "oh wow, the company Atari that once was a household name in the 1980s and later went on to publish numerous games I like is still investing in blockchain tech despite its recent decline"? These two different takeaways have very different implications (random speculative investor vs former giant turned underdog).
To put it another way, "elderly gentleman shares his opinion on invading Iran" and "former US secretary of defense shares his opinion on invading Iran" are two ways to break the same story and would likely both be factually correct but convey very different things about the merit of the opinion to the same audience (not taking the reader's personal biases into account).
It's not nerd sniping. That's not even what nerd sniping means. It's also explicitly not ignoring the headline, it's ignoring the article.
1. Other gaming platforms could add support to interface with it.
2. It's not the same. With these you actually own the NFT and won't lose it if game itself goes away and they stop supporting it. These virtual items will last forever.
3. The NFT part of games isn't about fun. The technology behind a game isn't just what makes the game fun. A game needing to be good will always be a problem.
1. Why should they? The selling point of supporting NFTs is selling NFTs. Also the "NFT support" shown in the article literally involves the company producing its own art assets based on the NFTs. Even if the sprites could be broken down to the same generic pieces as the randomly generated NFTs this would mean repeating the effort for every NFT collection. The motivation to do this for apes is clear (if you want to rope in the crypto crowd, apes are a good starting point) but you have to justify this level of effort for every single collection, plus every non-generic individual NFT.
2. The €10 I had left on my DVD rental place's customer card will also last forever but much like NFTs tied to the latest vaporware web3 game it's not worth anything because nobody else sees any value in it now that the rental place is gone.
3. The NFT part of games isn't about the game then. It's not contributing anything to the enjoyment of the game. It's just facilitating conspicious consumption to demonstrate real-life financial status in the game. Much like micro transactions, this is making the game less enjoyable just to milk some players (rarely those actually wealthy, more often those with worse impulse control or using other people's money, e.g. kids and addicts) for more cash.
Because they may want to provide user value by being a centralized place where you can manage all of your virtual items and NFTs are a component of that.
>it's not worth anything because nobody else sees any value in it now that the rental place is gone.
These items can be reused by other applications to give them a new life. Even in your DVD store example a competing DVD store or streaming service could offer you a sign up bonus or discount if you could prove you had €5 or more credit with the store that went out of business.
>Much like micro transactions, this is making the game less enjoyable just to milk some players
I see it more as the opposite. Letting someone sell the skins they bought to someone else is better for the consumer and isn't just milking them compared to games like Fortnite where nothing can be sold off.
> Even in your DVD store example a competing DVD store or streaming service could offer you a sign up bonus or discount if you could prove you had €5 or more credit with the store that went out of business.
This makes no sense at all, why should a company give me some credit based on credit I had with another company that is even out of business? I could see it working if the two companies are competitors, but if one of the two is out of business it isn't a competitor anymore.
>why should a company give me some credit based on credit I had with another company that is even out of business?
Because the more credit that person had with the other business the more valuable the customer would be to have.
>but if one of the two is out of business it isn't a competitor anymore.
There are still other competitors who will be fighting over all of the customers looking for a new a company to replace the one that went out of business.
> There are still other competitors who will be fighting over all of the customers looking for a new a company to replace the one that went out of business.
Then you don't need to prove prior credit with another company: the competing companies could just offer some free credit to new customers, as companies indeed already commonly do.
> It's not the same. With these you actually own the NFT and won't lose it if game itself goes away and they stop supporting it. These virtual items will last forever.
If the game goes away you have a token saying you own something that doesn't do anything any more. This is like totaling a brand new Lamborghini and going "it's fine, I still have the keys in my pocket".
Even if the game doesn't exist that doesn't mean the value of all items drops to 0. Someone could come along later and setup a private server that lets you import all the items you had from the original game. Someone could also develop an application where you can view these items which you may have sentimental value for.
Baldurs Gate didn't preserve the scarcity of items. You can duplicate the export and share that with many different people. Items are no longer a unique thing that exists in the world.
> Items are no longer a unique thing that exists in the world.
Given that anyone can apparently throw up their own instances of the game server and you can freely exchange NFTs generated by each that would seem to be a given from the start? Or how do you decide which copy of the dagger+1 NFT is legit of both where generated by different instances of the game?
Right, so the item is tied to a specific server, the functionality of the item is implemented by that specific server, and that server only trusts NFTs that it issued itself.
What value is the NFT adding exactly?
I'm not saying that implementing an item trading system via NFTs isn't a way to do it. Just that you seem to be ascribing a whole lot of importance to something that's basically just a technical detail.
Video games can already let you trade items between each other, export assets outside of the game to use elsewhere, exchange real money for things etc etc. if the developers want to let you do that.
This is not a technical problem,
this is a "I want games that do this, but nobody building games wants their games to do this" problem.
>Just that you seem to be ascribing a whole lot of importance to something that's basically just a technical detail.
There are implications of technical details. Take for example Valorant. Once Riot is done supporting the game you will never be able to play it again because the multiplayer uses centralized servers operated by Riot. To everyday users they don't really care and arguably they get a better, more consistent experience. But there are users who do care about the ability to be able to play the game when Riot no longer wants to operate the servers for it.
>Video games can already let you trade items between each other
Not really. If I wanted to trade a shulker box of totems on a Minecraft server for a CSGO skin without being scammed there is no way to do it. Games don't naively support it. If all the items are on Steam, Steam lets you trade items between users. But now you are relying on a centralized platform to facilitate this. NFTs offer a solution that is trustless and doesn't give even more power to Valve's monopoly.
>This is not a technical problem, this is a "I want games that do this, but nobody building games wants their games to do this" problem.
Now that NFTs exist a lot of the technical problems have already been slowed. Games aren't doing this because there aren't any big benefits to doing it. Games would be weakening their monopoly by giving power to the users by letting them use NFTs instead of just their own item system.
> Now nostalgic gaming brands like MapleStory, Neopets, and Atari are still trying to promote their blockchain initiatives [..]
I'm not familiar with the history of MapleStory but Neopets was infamously sold off at the time and the only thing classic about Atari at this point is the name since it has been bought and sold numerous times since the classic period the name evokes.
So I guess at least as far as these two names are concerned the obvious answer is "because people are sitting on those famous brand names they bought and still trying to figure out how to milk their nostalgia for money". In other words, they were a perfect match for the NFT cashgrab period and the companies owning those brands aren't willing to give up on that opportunity yet.
Framing this as "classic gaming names [..] going in on the blockchain" evokes the idea of long-standing companies or even former giants turned underdogs seeing some kind of technological merit in the blockchain when instead it seems more like investors bought some IP and are desperate to find new ways to milk it. Of course in a way Neopets was the original ape NFT collection, just without the rampant money laundering and speculative investment ponzi scheme.
EDIT: Looks like MapleStory is a pay-to-win/pay-to-play MMO so it's literally built around milking people for cash. So their motivation is pretty clear, too. None of these examples demonstrate any usefulness in blockchain (regardless of whether any such usefulness has been demonstrated elsewhere) beyond trying to get people to spend money.
Going against the usual knee jerk "crypto bad" reaction, I don't think nft-s are inherently bad in games. All the usual hatepoints (microtransactions, pay to win, developer still controls the use of the nfts, etc) are true or can be true with or without items being nfts.
The difference I care about is tradability and transferability, which is inherent to nft-s but not to normal in-game items. For example hearthstone, blizzard's warcraft tcg, would be much better for nft cards. It would get a second hand card market similar to MTG automatically if it used nft cards on some public blockchain.
All NFT based items have the same problem where these items rely on the goodwill of the people who make the games and they're the ones that end up deciding whether the item has any practical value or if it's even in the game in the first place. If I were a game dev I'd have no incentive to implement some foreign NFTs in the game when I can make my own NFTs or just go with the classic model where the items are just entries in one of my databases.
There's also a conflict of interest in where someone who is both a dev and has a lot of certain NFTs could attempt to make the in-game item busted or required for competitive meta in order to sell out their stock of NFTs at a high price.
The "card game with NFTs" has already been tried, it's called "Gods Unchained" and didn't really catch on because if you type "Gods Unchained" in YouTube search bar the top results are not about the game itself but about the fact that you can earn money in-game. People actually interested in playing the game end up playing with bots because the game has a profit incentive.
> these items rely on the goodwill of the people who make the games
But they rely on the goodwill of the game devs regardless of the items being NFT-s. Patches causing meta changes is a regular thing without NFT-s.
> someone who is both a dev and has a lot of certain NFTs could attempt to make the in-game item busted or required for competitive meta in order to sell
Or just do the same and sell the card in the in-game store for lots of $? As lots of mobile games do.
> If I were a game dev I'd have no incentive to implement some foreign NFTs in the game
By implementing some foreign NFTs you can bootstrap an existing userbase (especially one with clear on chain evidence for engaging with a similar game).
Another incentive can be satisfying the presumed demand for interoperable assets, such as avatars (being able to play with the same avatar in different games).
This all sounds cool in theory but I'd like to point out that NFTs have existed for quite a while now and so far none of these things have ever been implemented in any of the released games. Which makes me doubtful that people are interested in these kinds of solutions in the first place.
I'm not aware of any set of games that let you transfer items among them using a blockchain either, but this doesn't matter. Here's how it could work.
First of all, before being able to transfer items there's some preparatory work that needs to be done, regardless of whether you're going to use a blockchain or not. You need the various game designers to agree on a common format to encode those items, so that the different games will be able to parse the data when trying to import a new item. Ideally, you would like everyone to agree on a single format, but even having just a few groups of developers to agree on one fixed format wouldn't be easy. After that, you have to solve two game design issues: which items makes sense to transfer from a particular game to a particular other game and how to map the different attributes between the two games in a meaningful way.
As an example of the first problem, imagine what would happen if you were allowed to tranfer automatic rifles from Call of Duty to a RPG game where you are supposed to fight using a sword and a shield: you would ruin the latter game. As an example of the second issue, I never plaied World of Warcraft, but I think that WoW swords have very different attributes from Minecraft swords, even if on a superficial level we're talking about the same item, i.e. a sword.
Note that this preparatory work is the hardest part to do, because it isn't a mere technical problem but involves many other aspects. And you need this regardless of the actual technology that you're going to use to transfer the items.
After we solved the above problems we get to the transfer part. Sure, you could use a blockchain, but do you really need it? Here's an alternative way:
when the user decides to transfer an item from game A to game B, game A's server sends a message to game B's server saying: "User X wants to transfer item Y, here's a description of item Y in the format we agreed upon. Do you accept the transfer?". Assuming that we solved the initial problems, implementing such a protocol is easy enough that most BSc students could do it as part of a software engineering course. A possible question could be how the two games would know that they are talking about the same user. There are different possible solutions to this, an easy one could be to use OAuth to authenticate the user.
In the end, the proposal of using blockchains to transfer game items is little more than using a blockchain as a database.
> I'm not aware of any set of games that let you transfer items among them using a blockchain
Illuvium already released a suite of separate games with interoperable assets verifiable on a public blockchain; granted, they are all made by the same parent studio. But it demonstrates the principle.
> Ideally, you would like everyone to agree on a single format
The in-game representation could afford some creative licence by each studio. Having said that, there are efforts to define common standards for 3D assets specifically (even sprite animations for avatars); hard to say how realistic it is.
> if you were allowed to tranfer automatic rifles from Call of Duty to a RPG game where you are supposed to fight using a sword
Nobody expects that all types of assets would be universally transferable between every game imaginable. Simply verifying on the blockchain some proxy for experience points between Call of Duty and Apex Legends, in order to skip some of the initial grind, would be desirable and meaningful.
> you could use a blockchain, but do you really need it?
Blockchains have additional upsides: data persistence, decoupled from the longevity of any individual studio; resistance to censorship (a game could ban an asset, but it wouldn’t be deleted from other games); immediate compatibility with a broader financial system (e.g automatic lending protocols that enable you to get a currency loan against your NFT, without requiring permission from the game).
Your original question was about the existence of other technologies apart form blockchains allowing for transfer of game assets, and I answered that. My two main points are that there are other ways of doing it, and that the core issue is more about opening a canworm of game design problems rather than finding a technical solution to the exchange of information between games.
I still think that the added benefits of using a blockchain in this particular scenario are very little and not relevant in practice (e.g. a game studio doesn't close overnight, so users would have time to transfer their items somewhere else and I think no bank would accept my Minecraft diamond sword as a collateral for a loan), but these are my personal opinions and as such are debatable.
There are always potential other ways of doing something, but blockchains are readily available now. It’s like looking at a python library and commenting “i could implement some of that functionality in C, you don’t need to use python”. At some point it becomes a matter of reinventing the wheel.
> I think no bank would accept my Minecraft diamond sword as a collateral for a loan
Nftfi and BendDao are two protocols that can be used to obtain cryptocurrency loans on NFTs.
Blizzard could make their own second hand hearthstone marketplace if they wanted to. NFTs don't create that possibility. Blizzard judged that it's more profitable for them to be the sole sellers of cards at their price. While NFTs would enable secondary markets in hearthstone cards to exist outside of Blizzard's ecosystem Blizzard doesn't want you out of their ecosystem.
Furthermore even if they introduced something like that I highly doubt they'd use "some public blockchain" the risks from that would outweigh the benefits - they'd just make their own infrastructure internally.
I don't see a way in which NFTs solve a problem that can't already be solved more simply. After all valve secondary markets for games like TF2 have existed for more than a decade without needing NFTs.
You are kind of arguing my point. Blizzard won't do it because it loves exploiting their status against the player. But that's a point for nft-s, it would make it harder to exploit players. Yeah I agree it won't ever happen, but if it did, that would be a win.
Not “perfectly” well. There is the downside of cost. Without nfts they would have to invest in bespoke infrastructure for creating, storing, validating and trading the assets. With nfts, this entire infrastructure already exists.
I never said NFT-s were required or the only possible solution, I said that I don't think NFT-s in games are inherently bad or evil (which is a quite popular opinion)
Stuff like this would be interesting but I think could only work if all art assets are then also uploaded to IPFS, game code is made open source so anyone could run/build/modify the game experience without any permission of the original publisher.
No game business seem to be really committing to that full picture yet…
True from a pure solo experience perspective, blockhains are a social construct so only relevant between people. I can imagine e.g. wanting to matchmake against only those players in a tcg who will play with the cards they have on-chain.
> For example hearthstone, blizzard's warcraft tcg, would be much better for nft cards. It would get a second hand card market similar to MTG automatically if it used nft cards on some public blockchain.
The experiment is going on right now. You can play MTGO or MTG Arena.
You don't think it's enough to remind you that, given the choice between the two options you describe, people overwhelmingly preferred the one that you said was "worse"?
If I don't bother telling you why I think that is, will it be less true? What if I'm wrong about the reason -- will that stop the phenomenon from happening?
> The difference I care about is tradability and transferability, which is inherent to nft-s but not to normal in-game items.
I think you simply do not understand the usual NFT hatepoints, then, which is the vision of NFTs you are espousing is simply undeliverable.
Either you have a truly decentralized network that is necessarily expensive to run to prevent spamming, and you add all of your in-game items and transactions to that. This action slows the network down to a crawl, and makes each item swap cost hundreds of dollars in gas fees. Given how even AAA games are costing $60-70 these days, I hope you understand why that's underdesirable.
"What about layer 2???" you may ask. Well, if you would like to go a more centralized route by having a separate blockchain handle all of your in-game transactions, I can point to Axie Infinity [1] to tell you why that's a bad idea. Basically, in the dark forest of blockchain, centralization breeds failure, and unless you're happy with losing more than half a billion (!) dollars worth of "assets" from time to time, that is also quite unappetizing.
Tl;dr: if you're espousing NFTs for gaming after all of these, you either don't understand blockchain/NFTs, don't understand gaming, or have money to make by pump-and-dumping crypto tokens.
Axie Infinity used a proof-of-authority side chain secured by a multisig bridge. It was not what most people refer to as L2s - which can achieve the same scalability as a side chain but with much stronger security properties (using validity or fraud proofs), and without compromising on decentralization.
There’s certainly a good case to be made for NFTs and blockchains in games, but you first have to overcome their associated stigma and misconceptions.
The only difference between an in-game economy where items are transferable and an NFT version is that you can withdraw the items to neutral third-party exchanges and you can see the total inventory of items in the game at all times.
I think there are benefits to having an open economy. With the switch to proof-of-stake blockchains the environmental argument is moot. I don’t see what the big deal is with NFT hate other than a general push back against developers overly-monetizing (but then again, who will pay for servers?) and general hate for crypto.
Imagine justifying a second hand card market for DIGITAL GOODS.
I'm sorry, I'm completely tired by this bullshit. If a multiplayer (and competitive) videogame does not have everything unlocked then it's just a scam and time sink.
IMHO, it is not making sense to purchase in-game assets without the ownership. It is like paying for ebooks in kindle. But, what you get is actually right to read.
That’s absurd. It’s inside a video game. It’s all make-believe and inherently non-transferable, unlike an ebook. What would any afforded “ownership” actually mean in practical terms?
It’s yet another non-working solution in search of a problem.
Those invested in crypto are intentionally ignoring the fact that existence of some bits on some blockchain doesn’t mean EA or Blizzard have to honor any of this. And game items aren’t magically transferable between games because something something blockchain.
It is fortunate that the retailers you've chosen haven't messed up, or gone out of business, or been malicious. But so long as the ability to access the content is in their hands and determined on their end, it is an ongoing risk. It's hard to imagine today, but if Kindle ever stops being profitable for Amazon, it could all go away.
Same risk exists with e.g. Valve's Steam. I have bought games there, and I've had no problems in 10+ years. But I won't kid myself. The games are all DRM'd. If something happens, say Valve goes kaput, bankrupt, well, all that money is wasted and I can't access anything that I supposedly bought. It's happened with DRM'd material before too many times already to imagine it's impossible.
> But so long as the ability to access the content is in their hands and determined on their end, it is an ongoing risk.
And NFTs do nothing to change that, the moment the server hosting the content is offline your NFT is worthless. Of course the assumption is that someone else will start to host the content without getting paid and without actually holding the rights to the content. We already have that, it is called piracy and it works better without NFTs.
