This comes back to the core problem of crypto though - I agree that transferring skins would be cool or whatever, but distributed consensus does almost nothing to accomplish that.
A game developer already has to opt-in to the NFT system and then maintain indefinite support for the NFT system, so if you trust them to do that why don’t you also trust them to maintain the ownership ledger?
I guess there are a few concerns here. What if the game developer goes out of business, or dies, or accidentally drops their db? What happens if they decide they don't like one of their collectors and want to wipe their balance clean? (Of course, you could do this with NFTs as well, but you'd have to write it into the contract ahead of time).
On top of that, the developer would need to build and operate their own infrastructure for trading with the tokens. If they were NFTs, then they just slot into existing applications without any extra work.
You can address all of those issues regarding continuity equally as well with actual legal contracts as you can with crypto 'smart' contracts (and you need the legal contracts in either case).
There’s a lot of reasons this mechanism would be interesting for a game developer besides trust. e.g. mitigating payment processor fees.
But to your question of trust, one interesting application would be in distributed & decentralized games intended to be released to the commons, see Dark Forest or Lattice.xyz. For these OSS projects, even if the original game devs decided to stop development, the community could permissionlessly continue to build atop the game’s immutable contracts.
It’s a completely made up problem for which crypto is supposedly the solution
- We’ve known for 2 decades how to do skin or items exchange between games. It involves relational databases. Valve does it for their games or at least could do it at will. There’s not one unsolved technical problem here
- There is zero incentive for developers, publishers and licensors (you know the people that make up the game industry) to adopt any of it. My company dies, the licenses terminate and your items are toast. Technology does not at all change any of it because it’s not a technology problem. It’s a licensing problem. And if I paid for the license, by god no other developer else should get that value for free.
- Developers don’t want other developers to affect their own games, affecting visual design, polygon budgets, performance, power or any other aspect of the game. No benefit, only drawbacks.
- No, we don’t want you to bring your lightsaber or mickey mouse costume (you know assets that people actually find valuable) int our game because that’s a straight visit from the lawyers at the house of mouse and probably makes our carefully crafted game look like ass.
- No middleman is only a problem if you need a middleman or the middleman fails to deliver value. Not if you can be the middleman. People attempt to muddle this down to a payments processor issue, but the last decade has shown crypto is just plain shit at that, from gas fees to security, lack of customer protection and any other dimension. And if it’s not payment, well, we could just as well use a database to share games between developers at the same publisher or valve.
- People bring up demand for external markets like Diablo’s Auction house. But these demand economies are fractions of the overall game value systems and increasing the focus on the fraction very quickly erodes and destroys the main game.
- IP licensors don’t benefit if people carry their IP from game to game unless game and game pay the fee
- Publishers don’t want to give telemetry or data associated with the movement of players to others. Sorry, that’s just not a good idea. And they want to sell you items again, not you hoarding older items.
Even gamers … don’t want it. They understand that this is mostly crypto bro driven attempts of turning every game into a gacha / real world money affects escapism fantasy for people with less money when every rich brat is parading their instagram assets through town.
The only people who think this is a great idea (including Boz) are in silicon valley with a long history of failing to understand games.
I'm not even a crypto bro, but it's honestly more exhausting to listen to someone go on about how private backends with user facing storefronts and relational databases solve the same problems as blockchain, than it is to listen to a crypto bro explain why we can't trust companies to manage records in their own relational database.
Just wanted to point out that one of these things necessarily follows the other, and billions have been wasted by people who listened to the cryptocurrency advocates, but failed to heed the warnings offered within those hyper-verbose responses.
There’s a well-established effect, common enough at this point to where some academic has probably given it a name like “The Twitter Dilemma” or something, that describes how a lie can be much more potent and contagious with exponentially fewer words than are necessary to effectively refute it.
You should feel free to ignore the extended retorts if you find them tiresome, but the modern reality is that you will be more likely to fall victim to a huckster’s scheme as a result. In the immortal words of Matt Damon, “Fortune favors the incurious, who like them apples.”
>There’s a well-established effect, common enough at this point to where some academic has probably given it a name like “The Twitter Dilemma” or something, that describes how a lie can be much more potent and contagious with exponentially fewer words than are necessary to effectively refute it.
Amen. The anti-crypto crowd in 2023 are now the more belligerent of the two (since the crypto crowd have largely gone quiet.)
You can ideologically disagree with it's use a money and I could understand that, but decentralized databases could be used nicely to circumvent the steam store 5% marketplace fees. That's value removed consumers wallet and sent to Bellevue at 99.9999% profit.
It's not a technical problem at this point with the low fee + fast transactions + negative carbon DeDBs out there. It's an incentive problem - no game studio wants to give up their cash cow, and consumers are, rightfully, wary of web3. IMO, it's going to be a long climb back for what we now call 'blockchain', but in 5 or 10 years I believe there will be advocacy for SOME data to be (including digital collectibles) free and open. Ironically, I think AI will speed this up as the major platforms throw up higher and higher walls to keep AI out -- people will realize the only options for control of their public facing works is to self host or use some form of decentralized database. That or we all start using github for social media.
That’s exactly what I am saying. It’s not a technical problem, it’s an incentive problem and the entire industry has no incentive to adopt a the technical solution these people are parroting to investors.
Why do I even bother to reiterate the rest of the paragraph that you did not quote? Game developers and their users are regularly exploited by App Store and payment processor fees. Transfers of ERC721 and ERC20 on an L2 is negligible by comparison:
Google recently changed tack on NFTs, allowing them in the Google Play stores, which means it is now allowed by their policy to circumvent the store fees for this use case.
But the more obvious solution here is to not use the walled garden app stores at all, if you plan to monetize and distribute assets via crypto. Thankfully we do have the web and PWAs.
It depends on exactly how the system is decentralized, but let's imagine that the tokens contain sufficient information to generate the e.g. skins. And now imagine some company decides to stop supporting this group of tokens, or perhaps goes bankrupt. In a centralized system that's the end, but in a decentralized one another company is now free to take advantage of that gap in the market and offer to support those tokens.
There's some pretty neat possibilities here, but they'll take a while to emerge. Not only is there no immediate profit motive (for a company on the complete up and up) but there's an active anti-profit motive since you're voluntarily ceasing otherwise profitable/powerful control for ideological gains.
> In a centralized system that's the end, but in a decentralized one another company is now free to take advantage of that gap in the market and offer to support those tokens.
You’re saying the new company makes a new game to support the skins?
Other than “making those skins be worth money,” why do we need to spend so much effort on proof of ownership then? Couldn’t the new developer just make those skins available for free and improve everyone’s lives?
People like to own things. It's the entire point of tokens. They enable one (in the optimal scenario, which exists for some but not all tokens) to own digital things in the same way you might own a hammer. You can transfer it, sell it, use it as your company logo or whatever else you want. And all of those rights are transferred alongside the token.
In this case a new company could support those tokens, but not without the owner's permission. So they could not make the skins available for free, even if they wanted to. It's kind of akin to how when you post on this site, what you post is actually legally copyrighted by you. The reason HN is able to publish it is because in the terms you agreed to, there is a clause where you license your text to them for display, and much more. But you could sue HNClone.com for copyright infringement if they chose to publish your text, without your (or YCombinator's - due to the extremely permissive license we grant them) permission.
A game developer already has to opt-in to the NFT system and then maintain indefinite support for the NFT system, so if you trust them to do that why don’t you also trust them to maintain the ownership ledger?