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by vimy 1679 days ago
Sunk cost fallacy. If someone invested money into a game they might be reluctant to switch to a different game. But what if they can just take their investment with them and import it in another game. Then spend more in the new game.
1 comments
roywiggins 1679 days ago
Why would the other game want to make this information portable? Why would Minecraft want to let its players walk away to Roblox with all their trophies and hats (or whatever)?
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Jtsummers 1679 days ago
They wouldn't, GP has the wrong idea of the sunk cost fallacy. The fallacy would be committed by the players, sticking with a game (and putting in more money over time) because they've already spent so much on it. Freeing them up to take their items elsewhere is the opposite of what game developers want (unless it's in other games by the same studio).

Same thing with other systems. Sony doesn't want their games to run on Xbox, and MS doesn't want theirs to run on Playstation. Why? Because then you wouldn't buy their consoles and they wouldn't get the money from licensing and cuts from their digital stores (you'd be free to choose, if your Xbox broke you could get a Playstation and keep going, breaking their revenue modeL). MS does want games to run on Windows along with their consoles because it keeps developers committing to MS's platform because it's sufficiently hard to migrate to the other consoles or OSes.

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vimy 1679 days ago
I was talking about the players. Studios will have no choice but to support it because gamers will expect it. Just like Sony has been forced to accept cross-play in Fortnite. All it takes is one big game with NFT support to start it.
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acdha 1679 days ago
> Studios will have no choice but to support it because gamers will expect it.

Gamers can't stop pre-paying for games which launch with tons of bugs or paying for micro-transactions which incentivize abusive game design. I am highly skeptical that even 0.1% of buyers would not play a game they otherwise wanted because it didn't allow some way to recognize your items from another game.

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roywiggins 1679 days ago
Why wouldn't the big players just stick all that information into one database and enable transferring assets back and forth that way? It solves the "wear my Fortnite hat in Minecraft" problem without making the entire database of who owns what world-readable. Like Zelle but for hats.
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