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by MisterBastahrd 1494 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.
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.

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".

> 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.

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".
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.
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.

Maybe it's because the technology isn't meant for being used as a storage medium for 'world logic" and the games that try to utilize it in this manner will be both expensive and terrible... so I give game dev studios and VCs enough credit that they have the common sense not to do stupid things that will fail miserably.