[LargeWu]

Gaming is actually a pretty reasonable use case for NFT's, or blockchain generally. At it's core, an NFT is a digital asset with verifiable ownership. Many, many games have the concept of owning digital assets; the fact that they're not on a blockchain is an implementation detail. All the hype around monkey-ape pictures and microtransactions was offputting to a lot of gamers, making the whole thing come off like a big cash-grab (which it mostly was), but from a purely technological standpoint, blockchain might not be a terrible solution for games with transferable digital assets.

[gs17]

> the fact that they're not on a blockchain is an implementation detail.

For a good reason. The blockchain doesn't add much over a database. Players being able to sell their items? Steam does that without a blockchain, albeit not for real money. Being able to take items between games? Almost no devs (or players) really want that. But blockchain would add difficulty changing things if there's a bug with the items (or not, but you lose the "security" it's supposed to add).

[PaulHoule]

For a while my son was playing this game

https://krunker.io/

which has rather good trading mechanics in the game (for non-NFT objects) and has a total of 20 or so NFT objects in the game. A handful of players own most of them, for instance there is only one type of watch you can wear in the game and there are only five of those and four of those belong to the same person. My son did see someone wearing a watch.

You can't say the NFT ruined the game for other players but you also can't say it is a success, I wouldn't say that until you have broad participation in ownership and trading.

[wnevets]

> For a good reason. The blockchain doesn't add much over a database.

The people doing all of the hyping up not understanding the tech is why I find all of this so amusing.

> Steam does that without a blockchain, albeit not for real money.

FYI you can buy in game items for real money on their market [1]

[1] https://steamcommunity.com/market/listings/730/AWP%20%7C%20A...

[LargeWu]

If you invested hundreds of hours into a game and accumulated a significant pile of rare items with in-game utility, and then decided you were done with the game, would you rather a) have the option to sell them for real money or b) have the option to sell them for in-game currency (which you will never use) or c) not have any marketplace options?

[nerdjon]

You're talking about a closed system for a single game though, what exactly does a blockchain actually give you in that example?

All 3 of those are possible with a traditional database.

Even if they wanted to provide a system for sharing those assets and other marketplaces being able to built on top of it, a blockchain still doesn't actually provide any benefits.

[bobthepanda]

A lot of them intentionally are not supposed to be sold for real value because in many jurisdictions, combining that with lootbox or drop mechanics would immediately make the game subject to gambling regulations.

Game dev companies don’t want that, they want to keep selling you stuff. See: games like the Sims

[duskwuff]

c). I play games to have fun, not to make money. And I'd rather not play games where success is determined by how willing you are to open your wallet.

[cogman10]

A real-world market attached to a game would be the fastest way imaginable to suck all the fun out of a game.

I don't want to play games where 90% of the players are using the game to try and beat capitalism somehow. There are 100 reasons why this'd destroy gameplay.

* The majority of players would be concentrated on the highest value grind tasks.

* Scams would be rampant. They are already rampant in games without this mechanic. Now imagine how bad they'd be if your items had actual monetary value hooked up to them.

* Gang like behavior is pretty much guaranteed to emerge. So, it wouldn't be just one player grinding like crazy, but groups of players dedicated to making the game miserable for anyone grinding on their turf.

* It would encourage actual real-world problems/crime. Now instead of being able to meet up with people and talk about the game, you run the risk of being mugged or stalked for game currency.

Just a really terrible idea.

And these things I'm talking about aren't imaginary. There're already more than a few articles about games like EVE Online and WoW where the marketplace of those games has led to the problems I listed.

EVE's "Real life threats" policy didn't show up because it wasn't a problem [1]

[1] https://support.eveonline.com/hc/en-us/articles/856270680092...

[gs17]

> Gang like behavior is pretty much guaranteed to emerge.

For example, one of the times it happened to RuneScape (which also has constant scammers too!): https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/imnp0g/every_sin...

[gs17]

I'd rather not have the marketplace, honestly, and I'm someone who got more than I paid from TF2. Trading items for items isn't so bad (maybe), but we don't need to make things even more pay-to-win.

Games should be about having fun, not second jobs, unless you're playing a simulator where your fun is doing the job.

[ClassyJacket]

Blockchain helps none of those things in the slightest.

[dingnuts]

Steam doesn't let you bequeath your account or anything in it and can ban you from your account at any time with no recourse.

If my game licenses were on the Blockchain I could give them to my kids when I die.

Feels weird explaining this on HN.

[gs17]

The discussion was more about in-game items than game licenses, but that falls under "almost no devs really want that". Devs want to be able to ban problem players from their games. Devs want (or at least would prefer) you to have to buy a new copy of a game instead of a cheap used one. It would be nice if we could transfer the licenses, but the developers don't want that.

And it also doesn't require blockchain. Valve not allowing it isn't a technological limitation, it's a policy. The system can't stop you from leaving a sheet of paper with your username and password on it, but Steam can ban you if they somehow find out.

[wnevets]

> Feels weird explaining this on HN.

Go ahead and explain how the tech of a Blockchain prevents Valve from doing what it wants with the game licenses it sells.

[nucleardog]

How do you enforce the blockchain on Valve?

If they go into the Steam server code and add:

    if username = 'dingnuts':
        return 403

How do you get your games back?

(Hint: You don't.)

So now you're back to "a database hosted at Valve" with extra steps.

[ClassyJacket]

And how do you enforce that Valve implements and respects the blockchain? You can't, and if you do you can just force them to respect a traditional database.

Feels weird explaining this on HN.

[throw646577]

Well, you couldn't, as the licences stand, because they are specifically non-transferrable too, right? In the wording.

[simonw]

Blockchain is a terrible solution for games with transferable digital assets.

How does the game developer benefit from outsourcing their inventory management system like that?

What if they release an in-game item that turns out to be completely over-powered and want to change or remove it?

(Amusingly enough the original inspiration for Ethereum was that Vitalik Buterin hated that his warlock got nerfed: https://www.polygon.com/22709126/ethereum-creator-world-of-w... )

[Zambyte]

> How does the game developer benefit from outsourcing their inventory management system like that?

Why should I care about how a third party in the transaction feels?

> What if they release an in-game item that turns out to be completely over-powered and want to change or remove it?

Then they can do that. A token being associated with a wallet is orthogonal to an item being rendered or used in a game.

[LargeWu]

Depending on the use case, you don't need to store the entire implementation of the item on chain, just a reference to it. All the implementation could still be stored game-side. You could also apply nerfs/buffs over the top of an item at runtime.

[gs17]

> What if they release an in-game item that turns out to be completely over-powered and want to change or remove it?

I'm not sure how/if real "crypto games" do it, but it wouldn't be impossible to have a list of "invalid" items the smart contract references that can't be used unless you use a second contract the developer set up to exchange them for the nerfed version. And I guess that could enable community-created formats with their own banlists (if the game is actually decentralized enough for that to be possible).

But then we've had to do a lot of extra work for a messy version of what we can already do with a normal database!

[vohk]

From a purely technological standpoint, a boring database does everything an NFT could for transferable digital assets.

This is the classic "solution looking for a problem" you see so often with NFTs and blockchain generally. The proposed problems (in this case verifiable and transferable ownership) already have mature, satisfactory solutions.

NFTs don't benefit consumers (because the tangible value exists in a centralized server somewhere anyway) and they don't benefit publishers (who can already implement those features if they cared to). They benefit people that want to get rich speculating on NFTs.

[throwaway48476]

Most people are tired of 400gb of cosmetics. They want less but higher quality. The NFT people also lied through their teeth about how NFTs work.

[LargeWu]

So, the use case I'm thinking of is more along the lines of non-cosmetic assets. Take FIFA Ultimate Team, for example. The way it works currently is that each player in the game has one or more "cards", or sets of stats. Special versions come out all the time which have significant impact on gameplay.

FIFA has an in-game market where you can buy/sell/trade cards, for in-game scrip. Want to sell your special Killian Mbappe card you just pulled? Congrats, you can get 1,000,000 FifaCoins, not redeemable for real money. Of course, you can certainly buy FifaCoins for real money.

A blockchain implementation could potentially allow people to sell that card directly to somebody else, for real money (or more specifically, crypto tokens that can be redeemed for real money). Would you rather have 1,000,000 FifaCoins, or $100?

Whether or not this is desirable to games is a different question, but the game is already essentially pay-to-win, so it's not like it would ruin the game from that perspective. It already has microtransactions. The main reason you probably won't be seeing this is because it would cut the publisher (EA) out of the loop, which is very, very lucrative for them.

[awkward]

The best example of this is probably the Diablo 3 real money auction house. It was a launch feature of the game that would allow items to be sold for real money or in game gold.

It was removed about eighteen months in, because it made the metagame significantly less fun. Switching from a localized rarity table with some light trading to an efficient global market meant that finding anything less than best in class equipment (bounded to level) was a disappointment compared to what could be bought on the market, and had to be to avoid flooding market supply.

Getting rid of the market and implementing more generous local loot algorithms probably gave the game at least 5 years more life.

[LargeWu]

Thanks for the history lesson. I think this is a much more compelling argument than "blockchain dumb".

[nemomarx]

if EA wanted to set it up so you could sell them for real money, with ea taking a cut, I think they could. of course they don't really want to let you do that, but even putting aside banking steam let's you sell cards for steam wallet money (which goes back to valve) and let's you buy cheap games for "free".

it's never really seemed like a limitation that needs a technical back end to fix it, it needs people to want to set it up.

[quickthrowman]

Why would any game publisher relinquish the insanely high profit margin DLC/skins they sell to an outside third party? It makes zero sense, they can just use a SQL database and keep all of the profits.

In short, publishers aren’t going to give the crazy margins they make on digital in-game items to a third party NFT blockchain, they’d be insane to do so.

[ClassyJacket]

There is no use case for NFTs at all. The "verifiable ownership" is pointless when you could just use a traditional database, as every individual game has to respect the blockchain - they could just respect the database instead, and not use the power consumption of Belgium to do it.

[wnevets]

its gonna happen its just around the corner!

[throw646577]

It's like tapping HN on the knee with a reflex hammer, isn't it?

[smitelli]

Can’t I just enjoy playing a game for however many hours without having to buy shit?