[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.

[rglullis]

They will not disrupt with the assets. They will disrupt it with the new game engines, and they are already backed by billions from VCs and the money from NFT speculators.

There is a reason that Valve is not too fond of crypto, and it is not "climate change".

[adbachman]

> There is a reason that Valve is not too fond of crypto

Because, like with third party Counter-Strike knife skin sites, it always devolves into money laundering and illegal gambling.

Only in an ecosystem like cryptocurrency that exists for those purposes does it make sense.

[rglullis]

Right, the fact that they would lose control over the distribution channel has nothing to do with it. It is only because they are oh-so concerned with "money laundering".

[MisterBastahrd]

Why would somebody be spending billions of dollars in VC money when you could just use whatever game engine you want and license a small third party library to do asset validation? VCs can't possibly be THAT eager to blow all their money unless it's as a PAAS ala Roblox.

[rglullis]

Since the beginning of the conversation, I am saying that is not about the assets. Why do you continue to center your reasoning around that?

It's like worrying about parking lots in a world where self-driving cars are available on-demand. If you don't believe that self-driving cars are ever going to reach that state, fine. But conditional on accepting a premise (web3 games using the blockchain as the basis of the world logic), you can not try to apply the rules of the old system into the new one.

[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.

[rglullis]

Yes, there was. E.g, I remember playing Nascar online with school buddies via dial-up. There was no DLC, no extensions, no pay-to-win. You bought the game once, and you played it forever.

[DanHulton]

Ah, okay, fair. I don't think anyone is super interested in a return to only direct-connect multiplayer. Third-party server browsers showed up in a hurry, to be quickly superseded by much better in-game server browsers, with official servers being preferred, to cut down on cheating.

And especially if you want any kind of global ranking to ensure reasonably fair skill levels for matches, you're going to need a centralized service.

Imagine a game like Valorant without any central server. It'd be a much different game, a lot less user-friendly. And some people would go for that, because it would appeal to their moral sensibilities, and more power to them. But it would get destroyed, market-wise, against actual, centralized, user-friendly Valorant.

That's not theory, that's history. Players demanded games have good server browsers, good official servers, and good match-making, and games that didn't provide that suffered.

[rglullis]

What you are talking about does not require locking users into the platform. It's totally okay to offer a service with your product, as long as it doesn't lock you into it.