I'm totally fine with people exploring and getting excited about uses for crypto and Ethereum, but I don't like the term "Web3"because it suggests that it's the next evolution of the web, when really it's a completely different technology. Hopefully this Web3 term is just a phase and will get replaced with something better.
On a side note, in Ben Thompson's Stratechery interview with the CEO of Unity this week, the Unity CEO used the term "Web 3" multiple times, but he was referring to a 3D/XR-enabled web rather than developments related to crypto. And I'm sure there will be many more takes to come on what the next version of the web will be.
So as far as I'm concerned the name is perfect, in that it stands for hype and hazy thinkfluencing that is trying to puff itself up into looking like foundational change.
I find it similar to the two currently in-vogue uses of the world "Metaverse" - you've got the crypto/web3 people using it to describe a world where NFT's are usable and recognised across software (ie. Armor you buy in Call of Duty is useable in Battlefield), and Facebook/Meta, trying to build a social VR environment not entirely unlike the vision of Ready Player One.
It's entirely probably they'll merge at some point if they haven't already.
This idea, "Armor you buy in Call of Duty is useable in Battlefield", to me illustrates so much that is frothy and unrealistic about this space.
Think about what it would actually take to implement such a thing:
- Call of Duty and Battlefield - rival games from rival companies - would need to agree to an integration at a VERY deep level
- They would have to share the same asset formats, such that an asset designed for one game could be used in another
- Issues of balance would have to be resolved: just sharing 3D models wouldn't be enough, they would need to agree on a system for modelling damage, armour piercing capabilities, visual effects...
- Then they would have to add blockchain integration deep enough that weapons a player obtains in the game are represented in a way that the other games can see.
- ... not to mention figure out some kind of exchange rate / add some kind of additional economy to their games, which would need to be shared across different games such that e.g. a pistol in Battlefield wasn't worth the same as a machine gun in Call of Duty
That's just off the top of my head.
And... they're supposed to be games! Game design is about balance - creating a set of rules that players enjoy.
Allowing some cryptocurrency-billionaire to jump into any game they like with the best possible guns and armour doesn't sound any fun at all.
Pretty much every idea I see coming out of this space has the same problem: it sounds plausible in a high-level hand-wavy, but collapses the moment you start to dig into the details of how it would work.
(My absolute favourite bad idea is still real estate on the blockchain, where presumably if I forget my password I can no longer sell my house)
And all of that hard stuff could be done entirely without blockchain, and would indeed not be made any easier by blockchain, because it's all just tricky gamedev work. Once you've got all that stuff done, you could just use an API or a normal database to transfer "digital assets" between games, and skip the blockchain stuff.
Oh, is making an interoperable API too hard? Well, it's not going to be any easier on the blockchain...
Exactly! This is my big critique about Web 3 — what can it actually do that we couldn't do already?
The new things people propose as Web 3 use cases, e.g. interoperable game items, simply aren't practical. That's why they don't exist already — not because they require blockchain to build.
I've heard people argue that big tech social media silos will be replaced by decentralized Web 3 social media, but why would they be? We already have decentralized social media. The reason Mastodon can't compete with Twitter isn't because it needs blockchain; it's because Twitter has all the users and all the money, and that's because centralization is just more profitable. It boils down to economics, not technology.
And we briefly had interoperable text chat with XMPP until the big players dropped support for it. The protocol already existed, it worked for a while, and then companies decided it wasn't in their interests to stick with it and the interoperable textaverse collapsed back into silos.
> Allowing some cryptocurrency-billionaire to jump into any game they like with the best possible guns and armour doesn't sound any fun at all.
If the game just trusts any NFT in the right format to be an item, you wouldn't even need to be a crypto billionaire. Minting an NFT costs less than $100 worth of Ethereum according to a quick Google search. Lots of random gamers would pay that much to mint a set of armor that grants + a million percent to damage or whatever.
The only workaround I can see to people minting insanely overpowered NFT items is to only trust NFTs minted by a whitelist of trusted game developers, so you have to actually get the item in a trusted game. But, of course, that completely defeats the purpose of using blockchain. It might as well be a normal API with a database. In fact that would be much more efficient because of the very high costs of publishing data to a public blockchain.
Even if you ignore the integration part and just leave it as a marketplace to trade/sell items, as yourself and others have pointed out, don't need a decentralized, public, cryptographically verifiable database (aka crypto/blockchain) for such an implementation.
Steam Community Market[0] pretty much a long running example of such a system, but it is missing one thing, you can't 'cash out' beyond your Steam wallet to spend on other items that aren't games or other virtual items. I think this is a valuable feature as it prevents the massive speculation on virtual goods that would absolutely ruin the ability to collect/use virtual goods for an economically efficient price.
Without it, I 100% believe artificial scarcity would prevail in search for the maximum value extraction.
I mean, I'm an indiedev and while I think that line of thinking, of re-using items between games, is pretty weak generally, I can see some use cases for it.
This already happens partly with asset stores like Unity's https://assetstore.unity.com/, where you can just buy assets to use in your games and multiple developers end up using the same assets. There's nothing preventing "popular NFT asset packs" from being a thing that, on top of helping devs make their games faster, would also end up helping indiedevs attract people to their games, since they'd be implementing certain NFT packs and users who own those would be more likely to check those games out.
Like I said, I think it's a pretty weak idea but it's not that crazy or ridiculous to imagine it happening to some degree.
There's a huge scale scale issue there though. When you buy an asset pack from the Unity store you bundle it with your game and it gets shipped with every copy (by whatever distribution means you use). Unity isn't involved in the last mile distribution. They don't need to care that I bought a copy of your game which contained assets from their store.
Further, assets aren't used the same way between games. Just because Game A and Game B use the same weapon asset pack doesn't mean it's fungible between games. Game A might use a damage scale from 0-1000 while Game B is rolling virtual dice with bell curve distributions. Game C uses a sword asset pack but shoots the swords out of a sword shooting bazooka strapped to a unicorn.
If I love Game C with its accurate unicorn physics, I don't care that it uses the same asset pack as Game B that's a D&D workalike.
There's virtually no utility for anyone storing the license of an asset pack on a blockchain. Unity doesn't care if I own a license to a game using an asset pack, they're not going to take on the cost of distributing it to me. Unicorn Bazooka doesn't want to give free advertising to the D&D workalike game by associating with it on a blockchain.
>There's virtually no utility for anyone storing the license of an asset pack on a blockchain.
A game engine built such that it can track games made with it that use a specific asset can have a percentage of the game's profits automatically go to the asset creator's wallet. So if you create some set of assets that are used by 500 different games, you're getting a very small percentage of each sale of each of the 500 games and you're being compensated for your work in a way that properly captures each game's success, rather than having each game pay you a flat fee. Wouldn't that be great?
I think people like you, who say that "there's virtually no utility to [new tech]" are just lacking a little imagination.
So it's great that someone making assets can only make a good return if the maker of the game is successful? If an otherwise good asset(s) are used in 500 shitty games that don't sell any copies, the asset creator gets screwed. They have no influence on the quality of the end product, successful marketing, or even whether it's gets completed. That's just working for free unless you get lucky. If that model of pay took off then a lot of people making assets will get boned and a couple will win the lottery.
For a game maker it's not much better of a deal. They get a low/no cost asset during development in promise for a cut of future sales. Now they've got percentages coming off every sale in perpetuity. They can only sell their game at a price the market will bear. If that's a relatively low price all those percentages for assets chip away at their net.
I don't see that model being great for anyone. Outside of lottery winners most participants just get screwed.
> I think people like you, who say that "there's virtually no utility to [new tech]" are just lacking a little imagination.
I might be lacking in imagination. It might also be the wisdom to see a lot of crypto-based ideas are just "solving" problems by introducing different problems.
Selling game assets on a blockchain and paying asset creators is only meaningful if people accept that blockchain's authority. If it falls out of favor/use/legality then it has zero usable value to anyone. I don't see any online stores accepting Beanz or Flooz and I know I've got some Geoffrey dollars somewhere that aren't worth much. I don't see why you think anyone will see any value in a particular blockchain around today.
What advantage would an NFT asset pack have over a regular asset pack? It is not uncommon for game assets to be many gigabytes in size, which is not a great fit for block chain.
You don't need an integration at all: you just call the other company smart contract to see if the user has a specific type of equipment defined by an NFT.
Problem is that this information should be private.
If I know you are a heavy user of some other game, maybe I can sell you something to advance in the game quickly instead of having to play a lot.
Is it desirable? For a game company, maybe. But for an insurance firm?
> You don't need an integration at all: you just call the other company smart contract to see if the user has a specific type of equipment defined by an NFT.
Does the code for cross-checking who holds what NFT on what platform just materialize out of whole cloth? Does Eth not have an SDK?
> and there is no need to have an agreed between both companies
Yeah, you would. The IP rights don't get thrown out just because there exists a pointer in a ledger that says you paid money to do widgety things with the content on someone's platform.
Same as other supply chain blockchain efforts, a single (usually still decentralized) public ledger indicating ownership. Though not all are aimed at decentralization, more at creating a public ledger with some cryptographic methods used to ensure its validity.
Are there big issues with the current system that exists today to prove ownership of a property you bought? Is real estate fraud common enough?
I never went through buying property before so I honestly don't know, but most of the people I know just hired a lawyer and got it done and it was never a thing they had to think about afterward.
There is potential use for storing the history of real estate ownership in a more robust way, as part of doing a title search as a prerequisite for a real estate transaction. But that won't get rid of the need for title insurance, which exists exactly to offset the issues and dispute around ownership and liens against real estate that put undo burden on real estate transactions. And it's probably folly to encode into law that a single "blockchain" of real estate transactions is final and authoritative without any kind of legal review, which is also why title insurance exists. It would make things more robust and perhaps faster to verify, but it doesn't get rid of the social (non-technical) issues around real estate ownership transfer, either historically or at the time of the transaction.
Title insurance might be cheaper if your county clerk’s title register were cryptographically verifiable by outside parties? Though that just requires a Merkle tree, not a blockchain
Not that I know of, just describing what I've seen others push it for. With supply chain, in general, it has some potential value (for auditing, in particular) but for large things like cars and homes we have (usually) government mediated records, and they're also usually public or semi-public (accessible with some effort, but not freely available on the public Internet).
I've talked to someone who worked on a (non-NFT-based!) solution for this in developing countries -- it turns out that yes, the cost to bribe officials to falsify documents to steal property can be cheaper than the property's market price.
You don't need a realtor to buy or sell houses; realtors advise, advertise, and network, lubricating the process so that you don't need to guess at what a good asking price is, or whether you need to repaint the walls. Blockchain real-estate would not in any way obviate realtors.
I don't really think of that proposed use case the way you are presenting it there -- I think of it more as, there will be a massive public cache of items, available to buy and sell on a neutral marketplace like OpenSea, which only one user can hold at a time, that game developers can bring in-game if they so choose. The implementation details would be unique to each game, and driven by demand of the NFT holders, so maybe some would be better in one game than in another.
And I'm not some NFT zealot by the way. I just think the way you're presenting that use case is quite a strawman. You're saying the companies have to agree to a bunch of stuff, but they don't, and that's the whole potential imo -- each can pick and choose how and if they want to bring a given NFT in-game.
Walking through your points --
- Rival companies have to agree to integration at a deep level -- they both have to independently decide to support a given NFT type, yes, but they don't have to agree with each other about how it's integrated. For instance, one might allow you to don your armor purely for aesthetics, whereas the other might add some performance advantage for owning it.
- They have to share asset formats -- not true -- the original NFT might point to some image, but each game could simply verify token ownership, and have their own assets representing it. Loot, for instance, is just text on a background. There's a lot of room for creativity in interpreting how those text descriptions might be implemented.
- Issues of balance have to be shared -- not true -- because each game could balance and implement the item the way they choose. And again, the base case could be a pure aesthetic implementation.
- They have to add deep blockchain integration -- I don't follow your point there -- they certainly would have to call the chain to verify NFT ownership, but again, they don't have to agree how to represent the items.
- Exchange rate -- isn't that the point of a public market like OpenSea? The market is already there, bidding and offering every day.
- Billionaires paying to win -- who's to say some games wouldn't invert what you'd expect so that common NFTs can actually keep up alongside rares, or even have advantages over them? Maybe in pitting a mob of commons against the rares, for instance. Again, this introduces more possible choice for players -- if some company today breaks their game mechanics to favor pay to win, you don't have a way to move your existing investment in that game anywhere else. Whereas if frustration grows with some popular NFT game, a competitor could come along with better balance and eat their lunch.
Okay, but suppose there's an NFT of a cool hat that I want. It would cost $1000. Instead I mint an exact copy of the hat for $10. Obviously it could be distinguished from the "real" NFT hat, but all of its properties (its color, its statistics, whatever) are the same. So every game not only has to decide what to do with every NFT, but they also have to keep a whitelist of NFT issuers to try to maintain some semblance of scarcity, I guess?
Eventually you'll have a handful of big NFT companies whose entire purpose is to manage the hat economy, because if you throw the door open to any old NFT, you immediately tank the scarcity that keeps it running. But since we have to trust a handful of big NFT companies anyway, they can now just bring the data about who owns which hat in-house and provide an API to every game that wants to interoperate. RIP the blockchain.
You’re overthinking it.
Nft is a proof of ownership.
So you import your Call of Duty armor in Battlefield and you get an equivalent ingame armor. There doesn’t need to be any agreement. The game just needs to know which nft is equivalent to the ingame item.
It’s kinda like McDonalds doing a promotion. If you bring a Burger King packaging you get a free Big Mac.
He posted a list of real, hard problems, all of which are correct. You posted an empty sales-pitch. The problem is not over-thinking.
Going with your analogy, think a bit more carefully: does that guy in the parking lot who sold you a Big Mac receipt have the power to compel Burger King to give you free food? That’s all the power an NFT has — there’s nothing magic about it, just a question about whether the business in question wants to do it. If they do, they don’t need a blockchain. If they don’t, a blockchain can’t make them.
No, it’s overthinking. The only thing that game developers need to solve is what item to give in return when a player imports something from another game. Could be you import armor and get a pink hat or a banana. It doesn’t need to be the same models, or same damage points or whatever. It can be anything.
Well yes, allowing to import an NFT is a business decision. Not sure what the point is?
That’s something different than the usual sales pitch of being able to use your items in another game, and it still makes no sense to involve an NFT. Why would EA give some of your money to a third-party now to potentially help one of their competitors in the future? If they want to setup a business deal, they’ll do it directly and avoid paying the middleman.
These promotions exist in the real world in one way or another.
Also, it is more likely that a few leaders will emerge in the NFT space offering a framework or platform as a service that is used by rival game development companies. You know, like when you boot up a game and see all of the logos for the frameworks they used.
Im not arguing that this is good. Just saying it is more likely to happen than not.
Dice / EA would want to maximize their profits through any legal, popular and mostly unpopular means. If that means entering some service agreement to support tokens from rival products then yes, they will. Anything that will increase particiation in their platforms is ideal.
Why wouldn’t they just make that deal together? That would give them more control, and they could split all of the money which would be going to blockchain fees instead of gifting it to third parties.
Sunk cost fallacy. If someone invested money into a game they might be reluctant to switch to a different game. But what if they can just take their investment with them and import it in another game. Then spend more in the new game.
Why would the other game want to make this information portable? Why would Minecraft want to let its players walk away to Roblox with all their trophies and hats (or whatever)?
They wouldn't, GP has the wrong idea of the sunk cost fallacy. The fallacy would be committed by the players, sticking with a game (and putting in more money over time) because they've already spent so much on it. Freeing them up to take their items elsewhere is the opposite of what game developers want (unless it's in other games by the same studio).
Same thing with other systems. Sony doesn't want their games to run on Xbox, and MS doesn't want theirs to run on Playstation. Why? Because then you wouldn't buy their consoles and they wouldn't get the money from licensing and cuts from their digital stores (you'd be free to choose, if your Xbox broke you could get a Playstation and keep going, breaking their revenue modeL). MS does want games to run on Windows along with their consoles because it keeps developers committing to MS's platform because it's sufficiently hard to migrate to the other consoles or OSes.
I was talking about the players.
Studios will have no choice but to support it because gamers will expect it. Just like Sony has been forced to accept cross-play in Fortnite. All it takes is one big game with NFT support to start it.
> Studios will have no choice but to support it because gamers will expect it.
Gamers can't stop pre-paying for games which launch with tons of bugs or paying for micro-transactions which incentivize abusive game design. I am highly skeptical that even 0.1% of buyers would not play a game they otherwise wanted because it didn't allow some way to recognize your items from another game.
Why wouldn't the big players just stick all that information into one database and enable transferring assets back and forth that way? It solves the "wear my Fortnite hat in Minecraft" problem without making the entire database of who owns what world-readable. Like Zelle but for hats.
That solves some problems, but not all. Games in the same engine can have totally different mechanics. Imagine an item that doubles the speed at which your health regenerates. Well, what happens if you use it in a game that doesn't have automatic health regeneration? It could just ignore that value, or should it double the effects of health packs instead?
Also, plenty of games use totally different scales for things. +10 to damage might be a huge benefit in one game, but a tiny benefit in another. The NFT could publish a value like "here's what the max value of the stat is in the original game" so other games could make it proportional, but stats might not necessarily have a max value.
Basically it seems like the only reasonable way to do this is for game developers to cooperate in some way, and if cooperation between devs is needed, the value of using a blockchain instead of a database + API goes away.
Around 2014 I looked, out of curiosity, into Ethereum and its EVM before Ethereum came out. Back then I even ran a node on... a Raspberry Pi (!). If I remember correctly even in 2014/2015, the official Ethereum client/node, written in Go, called "geth", was already using the term "web3" everywhere.
I'm not saying it's good or bad that people are using that term but all I'm saying is Ethereum using the term "web3" predates the "Metaverse" announcement by at least seven years IIRC.
It may be "en vogue" now but credit where it's due: Ethereum was using that term a long time ago already.
> I don't like the term "Web3" because it suggests that it's the next evolution of the web, when really it's a completely different technology.
The confusion is the point, actually.
This is about hyping something that nobody wants except for people who want to use it to exploit the rest of us in some way and the pool of marks who think they're going a A) get rich off of it or B) reap some vague future benefit that you don't actually need a blockchain for.
Random meta-observation from years of HN lurking: nobody ever likes the name of any new paradigm. And submissions that mention the name will be dominated by people complaining about the name, instead of the content.
Especially given that "Web 3.0" was already a term and (for better or worse) was mostly seen as synonymous with "Semantic Web". TBH, I never liked "Web 3.0" as a meaningless marketing buzzword then, but this is even worse because now we've overloaded a term which had a meaning with a confusingly similar term ("Web 3.0" vs "web3") which means something pretty much totally unrelated.
And yes, I know that terms in English get overloaded and that's part of life. Fine... but at least do it when there's a good reason for it. There's no particular reason to call this crypto/blockchain/ethereum/smart-contract/defi stuff "Web3". It could just as easily be "Web 4.0" or "Web 5.0" or "Fzbnnng^ztttzz@)@lyzmkizt" or whatever.
It's a concise, unique label, making it convenient to add to block lists.
It is amazing how much more cogent and actually interesting tech twitter is when you remove all of the "Will this make me rich and important, and quick?" web3 noise. It's the most fetch thing out there right now.
On the flip side, at least it drowned out the "Miami is the new silicon valley" noise (though humorously almost the same set of people are behind both)
That’s how I felt when Gavin/Parity people first started using the term, felt a bit like an appropriation. It’s a marketing term, people like new numbers like HTML5 or Industry 4.0. While it’s not perhaps so accurate for new decentralised storage/compute/consensus tech, it encapsulates the broader movement pretty well. I think we’re stuck with it for a while for better or worse - at least until web4!
I predict that "web3" will follow the same trajectory as "ML/AI" -- keep stuffing more and more completely different models and techniques and technologies in under the same vague heading until one of them eventually starts to do something really useful and then credit that to the nebulous term itself.
