[sstevenshang]

Excellent article, and the thing is that if you spend any time talking to gamers or on gaming platforms, there’s a near consensus on this attitude against in-game purchases that contribute nothing to gameplay. Even though people still make these purchases, I’d say most of them are conscious of the fact that the current trend is detrimental to gamers.

As a side note, the only people pushing for NTFs in games are crypto enthusiasts or profit-seeking actors who do not care about game experience at all. Even gamers who are also into crypto do not advocate for NTF in games. The whole thing is a shit show IMO.

[donmcronald]

I think the NFT thing should be illegal. It adds nothing beyond a false promise that you're buying an "investment" instead of an in game item. IMO it's disgusting to see game companies targeting kids with a scam like that.

As for the rest of the article, he could be talking about me. I've basically given up on PC gaming. I used to love gaming and now it feels like a second job. It feels like I'm being forced to "accomplish" a bunch of in game goals because the developer thinks "engaging" me like that is going to lead to a microtransaction.

I thought I'm probably just getting older and grumpier, but I bought an Oculus Quest before Christmas and it's been a blast. Games like The Room had me feeling like a kid who just got their first PC game. I think a lot of it has to do with VR being a new platform and there's less focus on developers squeezing every penny out of you and more incentive for them to build small, fun games that help discover what makes sense in VR.

The craziest part is that I've spent several hundred dollars on VR games in a few months which is more than I've spent on PC games in the last 5 years combined. I know it's popular to trash Meta/Facebook, but I think they did a really good job of pricing VR games. It's <$30 on the high end and they have frequent sales, but the sales aren't such deep discounts that I feel bad for buying something at full price.

I also think microtransactions can make sense. GGG did a good job with Path of Exile. I've played that game on and off and every time I pick it back up I play for a bit and if my stash starts getting disorganized with items that have a convenience stash tab as a microtransaction I'll buy that stash tab. It's always after I've spent a weekend playing and it's only $20, so I don't feel like I've gotten ripped off or forced into buying something. I've probably spent twice as much on that game as any other in recent memory.

[prox]

I guess it very much depends what kind of games you play. These are the games I enjoy : Rimworld, Valheim, Police Simulator, Project Zomboid, Space Engineers, KSP 1, Factorio, Skyrim, Mount and Blade 2 : Bannerlord.

None of them have significant money sinks with add on purchases. Most are modable, adding to their appeal and longevity.

[paulmd]

> None of them have significant money sinks with add on purchases. Most are modable, adding to their appeal and longevity.

over-monetization is actually one of the things that's ruining modding, because if you let players mod whatever they want there's no way to get them to pay 10 bucks for a vorpal sword +3 when they could just mod it in.

this is one of the major pushes away from story-driven offline single-player content at present, there's no safe way to monetize it. To monetize it safely you need always-online, DRM, and ideally it would be better if there was some minimal amount of "multiplayer" interaction (but not so much that you have to spend a bunch of money on servers).

the titles you've named are mostly old titles (Skyrim) before monetization really took off, or indie titles. To get an AAA developed these days it pretty much needs an online component.

[donmcronald]

You're right! Rimworld and Factorio have been on my Steam wishlist for a while.

[washadjeffmad]

I'd separate that into two categories: consensus that "withholding content, breaking games up, or locking devices to stores to artificially create redundant sales" and "abusive monetization design where the game is mostly a flimsy pretext for their real product, a gambling addiction simulator" are reviled industry practices.

People like their stores and skins, they just don't want to have to gamble to get them or be tricked into pay-to-play.

I tried a popular mobile game for the first time recently and almost immediately uninstalled it. As a new player I was overwhelmed with freebies, but every action funneled me back to the store or demanded some kind of worthless interaction. I was horrified at the thought that I might ever allow myself to get used to it and just how many people already had.

[bluefirebrand]

> People like their stores and skins

Two types of people here, too.

Those who bought "Horse Armor" and those who thought it was the most ridiculous thing they had ever heard of.

Personally I dislike the move towards every game being a live service to justify the presence of a store with skins and emotes and such.

I'm getting sick of always online, seasonal event driven live service games where the game balance constantly changes and new stuff is funnelled into it constantly. It is such a relief to me when a game just is released in a mostly final shape, with maybe some QoL patches and an expansion dlc or two.

Destiny 2 ruined this for me in a big way with how they are not just introducing new content but also removing old content, content I paid for and now can never access again.

It has set a terrible precedent and I'm just not going to use my money on games like that anymore.

[p1necone]

> Destiny 2 ruined this for me in a big way with how they are not just introducing new content but also removing old content, content I paid for and now can never access again.

There are good reasons why this can be healthy for a game that's constantly evolving with new content and is intended to be live for like a decade+ like Destiny. By sunsetting old content periodically they have a much easier time balancing everything, and making sure the world is consistent. They can also do visual improvements over time without having to polish an ever increasing pile of old content.

See also: leagues in Path of Exile, set rotation in trading card games.

Destiny is an MMO, you should know going in that it's a live, evolving beast. Not something that you can rely on staying the same forever.

[washadjeffmad]

PoE leagues are exactly what I expected from Destiny 2, so I was pretty confused when I realized there wasn't a "main game" to go back to. Whatever you didn't accomplish during the season was lost when it ended, and nothing you worked to gain was guaranteed to be worth anything next time.

I suppose it was my first "MMO" because I certainly hadn't played anything with that type of model before.

[Bombthecat]

I think the idea of nfts is cool, imagine star citizen where everyone could model ships and sell them as nft and set a counter of how many they sell (are available) the market should then set the value between work put in to design the ship, sell it and how many are available.

So juat like right now, you could buy a ship for 5 dollar, cheaply designed and thousands are available (or endless) or get a unique nice and good looking ship for ome thousand (or more?) because you need to pay the work of one guy for several days and its only one time available.

What get right now: bullshit, scams and everything controlled by the company selling the game.

[fattless]

I’ve always said that something like this could be a cool idea, but I don’t get why nft/blockchain is necessary. Speaking about the Ubisoft nft thing (because I understand it the best), Steam marketplace has been doing the same thing very well for years, offering a very similar expirence. Is there something I’m missing?

[kipchak]

The only downsides to to the Steam marketplace is it hasn't caught on very much outside of Valve's own titles, and you can only cash out to store credit, which has resulted in third party trading sites that run on top of the steam marketplace to emerge such as marketplace.tf, which relies on trusting the site not to swindle you. Both of those are fairly small issues, I think the trickier part is creating an environment/reason for anyone to care about the digital items that are for sale.

[fattless]

Agreed. These all seem like problems that can be solved somewhat easily, this seems like a problem that has been solved already and others are trying to cram blockchain into it. Like I said, could be totally missing something though.

[tasha0663]

> imagine star citizen where everyone could model ships and sell them as nft and set a counter of how many they sell (are available) the market should then set the value between work put in to design the ship, sell it and how many are available.

Uh, is that fun or am I back in economics class?

[83457]

Yes

[nest0r]

But why would I need NFTs for that?

[saurik]

NFTs (as defined by ERC721 or whatever it is) by and large end up acting as an interoperable standard that allows the assets to be traded on unified exchanges with assets from other games in a way that doesn't require any of the game developers to have to deal with money transmission issues (as they would only ever sell, not buy or facilitate trade).

Like in some sense all the NFT is to the game you develop is a minimal external yet-trustable representation of the existence of some in-game asset so people can then go and use all of these systems you don't have to worry about to trade it around and then anyone can provide the receipt back to your game later to be the potentially-new owner.

[verdverm]

The hard problem is how to use an asset in-game, beyond the visual aspect. What is the speed, rate of fire, etc.

Each game does this differently, their code is not the same, their assets are managed in many ways. How do you propose to deal with this?

[Bombthecat]

Like any rpg, but not for character creation, but for whatever?

[verdverm]

That process is very different for each game. Do you make them all use the same rules and mechanisms? What differentiates games then?

Have you tried to develop a game? It's much more complex than most applications. There are no standard libraries or APIs for this type of thing.

[lmm]

A few old RPGs tried to make it possible to import characters from the previous entry in the series. This generally didn't work very well, and those were first-party games; to do it for a third-party game seems a lot harder.

[antifa]

As usual, NFTs have a lot of "these 2 circles will be an awesome owl" but the rest of the owl never gets drawn.

[vorpalhex]

We can't agree on what file format to use most of the time, nobody is going to make interoperable textures/models/etc between games.

NFTs would still be a "thing of value" and still be beholden to all the same rules as other things of value.

You still have AML issues.

[thebean11]

> nobody is going to make interoperable textures/models/etc between games

Unity / Unreal Engine asset stores are just that aren't they?

[vorpalhex]

And how often do you import those assets to find they don't work correctly in your game? That they need a different shader, renderer, lighting or additional configuration? How often do they fail to blend in with other prefabs?

[tasha0663]

> an interoperable standard that allows the assets to be traded on unified exchanges with assets from other games in a way that doesn't require any of the game developers to have to deal with money transmission issues

FALSE. The assets from the games are not being traded in your hypothetical. The NFTs are.

> minimal external yet-trustable representation of the existence of some in-game asset

TRUE, BUT all it does is confirm someone calls dibs on something. Actually integrating those dibs in any sensible way is a huge task. It might be the "Deluxe Crystal AstroBlaster9000" in one game, but due to trademark issues, you might have to settle for "1 Ripe Banana" in another.

> so people can then go and use all of these systems you don't have to worry about

UNLIKELY. Developers would be one hashtag away from the Internet mob demanding they not allow people to use items pointed to by NFTs purchased with Dunning-Kruggerands that have dirty histories. The whitepapers might say you don't have to worry about it, but the users will.

Then there are security concerns. There will be a bad contract. There will be a phishing scam. The whitepaper might say code is law, but the users are still going to want the developer to make it right, or they'll walk.

[nest0r]

Why would any publisher do that? They make their profit on ingame marketplaces by taking a cut of the transaction it just doesn't make any sense.

[Bombthecat]

The publisher can take a cut from minting (creating an nft) and taking a cut from every sale, for example 30 percent first sale and then any other sale 10 percent.

[nest0r]

What would be difference between whaht they are doing now ie. Steam wihth cosmetics in csgo or tf2 and NFTs? It would only add overhead.

[Bombthecat]

Nfts itself aren't the "game changer" the game changer is the combination of nfts and smart contracts, where various attributes are defined for the nfts, and they are not changeable.

In the steam marketplace, the developer can change things easily, like changing a super rare card in a collectable card game to a common card.

[donmcronald]

It seems like all negatives IMO. How does a developer re-balance a game if they sold an NFT item that's game breaking? Do you upgrade every other NFT item to compensate? Who pays for that? Everything on the blockchain is a transaction, so who's going to pay for attribute changes? What if you want permanent damage on items so that pristine NFT items are more valuable? Who's going to pay the transaction fee to have their item tagged as damaged or destroyed or with any negative stat?

We already know in game items that affect gameplay basically ruin the game for anyone that isn't a whale. The NFT proponents think they can get everyone emotionally invested like the whales are, but good luck catering to the masses to keep them happy. It's only possible with whales because there aren't many of them and they're the largest source of revenue.

Once you realize that blockchain and NFTs are about charging processing fees for every single event that happens the whole thing looks terrible. Eventually you'll be paying fees to track your items stats, so every time you click or tap it costs money.

[tasha0663]

> developer can change things easily, like changing a super rare card in a collectable card game to a common card.

NFT doesn't block this at all. Just because an attribute on the token specifies it's rarity, doesn't mean there aren't a gajillion other tokens pointing to the same thing. Or that someone won't just tweak things on the server so that token_url /foo/92 isn't legendary magic beans anymore but common turd burgers instead.

[spaceisballer]

Is it really a game changer? I don’t see the problem it’s fixing or the benefit from using them. Just because a developer technically could change something means some solution to prevent change should be implemented?

[staticman2]

The developer can change the code of their engine at any time, including interpreting rare nfts to be equivalent to common NFTs, so this doesn't make any sense to me.

[Tyr42]

Or just reprinting a card in future sets, if you want an example from Magic the Gathering.

[nest0r]

That doesn't sound like it would be an incentive for a publisher or developer.

[stemlord]

Do you mean "NFTs"?

[sstevenshang]

Yes NFT! I keep making the same typo everywhere.