[bpeebles]

It's just as easy for a game developer to say "eh we're no longer using that blockchain for game assets" or otherwise make your "purchase" (which isn't really a purchase) unusable with a blockchain based solution as it is with current Steam/iOS-based systems. (Probably easier, really.)

[zmgsabst]

Absolutely easier:

Steam and Apple stores have policies that merchants are legally liable for, including refund and availability policies.

Who enforces it when the creator no longer honors your token?

[mpeg]

You're missing the point, the game developer obviously has to buy into the ecosystem, but the difference is with the current status quo in-app purchases are not really owned by the customers, so even if another game developer wanted to honour their purchases there is no way to interop.

Web3 is a pretty good use case for this, and the transaction costs barely add anything if you compare to the cut the platform takes (Apple takes 30%) so the game publisher could easily swallow this extra cost too (which could be tiny)

[Nursie]

They'll never be owned by the customers. They're owned by the companies that design them. Other developers do not have the right to include your purchase in their games due to law, not technical problems.

Further, you're now talking about having a way to bring your level 28 sword of whacking into a completely different game world. And somehow you think this is just a matter of an in-app purchase.

It's a weird fever dream.

[bentcorner]

This feels like a tiny tiny edge case. How many developers simultaneously have the rights to an IP and have the game asset data and code, but also lack the ability to retrieve purchase data on that other game?

[cecilpl2]

> the difference is with the current status quo in-app purchases are not really owned by the customers, so even if another game developer wanted to honour their purchases there is no way to interop.

Roblox already does this. Your in-game purchases are yours and you can carry them from one game to another.

Platforms outcompete protocols - this is why web2 became centralized.

[web41]

> Your in-game purchases are yours and you can carry them from one game to another.

this is close to what web3 is trying to achieve but with all digital assets like domain names as well.

not familiar with roblox but it sounds close to this, except built on a private centralized ledger instead of public and decentralized. so the assets are attached to roblox as a company.

[rglullis]

It's not about "game assets". It's a about having disintermediated access to the state of the "world".

Think of all the stories of startups that offer a product that locks their users and then go to be acquired/shut down by some other bigger company. If the services and the data live on the blockchain, it's guaranteed by design that the users are in control of their own data (no lock in) and that if the company just drops out of the market, others can continue using the services however they want.

[wollsmoth]

This doesn't make any sense to me. The blockchain just says you own a thing, it might even have some data about the thing. But what are you going to do with it? If the game company decides to shut down their game, what do you actually do with a digital hat you bought on the blockchain?

Oh, yeah, maybe someone else will make another game and do the work to support a digital hat you bought from someone else. Maybe it'll happen in a bid to try to scoop up users of a dead game. Or maybe, they'll just make their own digital hats and sell you a new one.

[rglullis]

Substitute "digital hats" for "exclusive contract with the star player on FIFA Football Manager", or "a mine that produces unobtanium on a blockchain version of minecraft"

And yes, I am not much of a gamer so these examples might sound super silly today. But 25 years ago the idea of people making a living by collecting and selling items on WoW would also be met with general skepticism, so we never know what the future holds.

[adbachman]

You named two examples that only make sense in a centralized platform world.

FIFA licensing will always be a thing and collecting and selling WoW gear / accounts only worked because other people wanted to play WoW that badly. Both work because they're tied to a platform, not in spite of being tied to a platform.

[rglullis]

It's amazing how unimaginative people are when they are biased against the innovation. The examples I gave were only to bring an analogy. Of course the next version of FIFA FM won't be licensed by FIFA. We are talking about a world without intermediaries. Star players would themselves be creating blockchain avatars that could be tied to their real-world performance. Fantasy Sports already exist, web3 just removes middlemen and make existing mechanics possible.

[wollsmoth]

...What? Why wouldn't the next version of FIFA be licensed by FIFA?

I guess I don't really know what you're suggesting. As it is, people gotta get a new Madden game every year just to update stats. This isn't because of some kind of technical limitation afaik. EA just wants to sell a new game every year. In fact, I think they might have to buy the data and the right to use it from the league.

[DanHulton]

All of these games run on centralized servers, though. You can "own" whatever assets you want on the blockchain, when that server goes down, they stop having any use at all.

[damon_c]

Games run in many different contexts. The difference is that instead of your game state/achievements/assets being controlled by a balkanized industry of competitors seeking to lock you into their platforms, it could be stored publicly on a blockchain and available to you regardless of platform.

[MisterBastahrd]

But in the real world, companies have to build and test assets. Blockchains are ledgers, and NFTs are receipts: they're far too expensive to hold a lot of data. They're never going to hold game assets.

If you want to say that Activision or Square-Enix come up with a tokenized platform for their own assets, which you can then use in other future games, that's marginally interesting. But Activision isn't going to care one bit about creating tokenized assets that players from Square bought on Square's platform. There's no money there.

Furthermore, players play for assets all the time in order to show off. When you start flooding the market with items so that players have cool stuff from day 1, you create a disincentive for them to push through and acquire these other items.

[rglullis]

Who cares about Activision or Square-Enix? It's not going to be Activision that is going to build the blockchain-powered generation of gaming platforms. It's going to be one of the many small dev teams that wants to find a way to disrupt the market.

[MisterBastahrd]

Well, for one, they're the prime use-case for this sort of thing because they have the resources. None of these podunk little developers is going to "disrupt" the market with blockchain assets, because of ALL the developers and studios, they're the LEAST capable of designing and testing assets that did not come from their studio.

"Hey Jim, we have a hotfix we need you to work on."

"No time for that, Bob, XYZ Gamecorp just created a pair of shoes on the blockchain, and even though it's only going to net us a nickel, we're going to spend the next week working on getting it into the game."

Might as well just light their studios on fire and try to recoup the insurance money, because it'd ultimately be more profitable.

[creeble]

But then... what’s the incentive to build a platform?

This is the part I don’t get. Use web3 to build your game, but you own no users. I get the value prop for users (in theory), but what is the value prop for developers?

[rglullis]

> you own no users.

There used to be a time where people made money by providing actual products and services, not by locking users into a platform and exploiting them.

[DanHulton]

For multiplayer video games, this has essentially never been true.

[the_gastropod]

Many apps offer you your data if you want it. For example, Facebook. I think people overestimate how useful data is outside of the application that was tailor-made to handle the data in the precise format it's in.

I guess "Web3" (it pains me to even use that term) would allow another developer to reverse-engineer an application to digest the data as it exists on the blockchain, but... that seems like a pretty negligible improvement over the status quo with many very significant drawbacks. For starters, a Raspberry Pi has orders of magnitude better performance than the "Ethereum World Computer". To make that concession, I'd hope for a much better benefit.

[web41]

> Many apps offer you your data if you want it.

but it is still locked into the walled garden. if 5% of Twitter users want to escape the platform when a billionaire buys it and reinstates Trump, their only option is to use an entirely new protocol (Mastodon).

if 5% of OpenSea users want to escape the platform, they can and already are doing so because OpenSea never owned the tokens and media on its platform to begin with. see: LooksRare, Zora, Rarible.

[kristjansson]

Great! I have 132GB of photos, and would like to store them on the blockchain to ensure I always have access to them. How much will that cost me? Show your work, and round your answer to the nearest million.

Maybe too much snark, but there’s a real tension there. “Store it on the blockchain” means “store a copy on every single node, forever”. It’s understandable that incurs some costs, and that one has to store only the most essential information. Maybe, there are some paths forward, like sharded chains?

[rglullis]

No. The blockchain is not a data store. The blockchain is needed only when you need:

- global view of the state that is taken as truth by all participants (consensus)

- where anyone is allowed to make operations to change the state (permissionless)

- and all operations that change the state are agreed by all participants (trustless)

You don't need the blockchain to store your music collection. Any content-addressable filesystem can do that for you. But you do need a blockchain if you want to make a decentralized "top-40" list.

[kristjansson]

I actually agree with all of that. I don't agree that storing that sort of data on the blockchain supports statements like "the users are in control of their own data". You're make a distinction between assets/content/etc. and 'data' that I don't think most users would recognize as a difference. If I make a playlist on decentralized-Spotify, and then that service goes bust, it's weak comfort that I'm able to move a list of song-hashes unless I (or another service I can move to) have access to the corresponding content. I can only exert as much control over my data as I over the off-chain content store[1].

What categories of data do you see that (a) average users care about and (b) would want to control beyond the life of a service provider but (c) doesn't depend on the availability of assets/contents/etc. cannot be viably stored on-chain?

[1]: Sure, FileCoin and dependent services offer some control and guarantees over off-chain data I guess.

[rglullis]

> What categories of data do you see

Again, it's not about the data. Data is cheap. It's the meta-data and what you can do with it that is interesting. It's about the new classes of applications that might come up when the underlying data is not stored by any middleman.

To illustrate: the "Pirate Bay catalog" is many times larger than anything offered by any of the streaming services, but the majority of people still prefer to pay for the services. Github is the destination of almost every open source project, and companies are paying a good amount of money not for the storage of data, but for what it can be done with it.

[candiddevmike]

I don't think blockchain is the answer for this. The answer is self-hosting and requiring SaaS companies to offer a self-hosted version.