Gaming news too small for its own thread

[wakka]

The only thing I would say about the above is that proof of stake, much like the fabled lightning network, has repeatedly been pushed back. I will believe it when I see it.

[chopemon]

I'm with the author in that I believe NFTs are a terrible idea and a scam. However, regardless of what side of the fence you are on them, implementing them in games presents massive design, tech and asset generation challenges. Here's a relevant quote from the article.

"“What If You Were The Only One To Own A Thing…”
So, I’ve heard this from a few NFT types, but I also saw it in Bloomberg, and that’s the example I’m going to use now: “what if you had a game like mario kart but only you owned mario?” Well, imagine how ****in awful you’d feel if you bought Mario Kart so you could drive Mario and you found out some other guy got Mario before you. Of the 39,000,000 human beings who own Mario Kart, only one guy gets Mario. Sure, he’d feel special, and everyone else would feel like ****.

Well, okay, here’s a few questions to ponder:
how do you anticipate the number of unique characters you’ll need to add to your game prior to its launch?

are you placing a cap on your game’s growth by requiring yourself have at least one unique character per player (if the fantasy of your game is “this character is MINE and no one else has it…” how do you this without guaranteeing every player at least one unique character?)
if every single character in the game is unique, and you’re Mario Kart 8, that means you have to come up with 39,000,000 unique characters.

Can you actually make a character iconic when they’re one of 39,000,000? Mario’s iconic nature comes from the fact that anyone can play him. If only one player ever could, what’s the likelihood that Mario would ever become famous or iconic — and thus desirable?

how do you balance 39,000,000 unique characters? where would you even start?
if you decide “i’m not going to balance them, the stats are random,” how do you determine how a character rolls? Could players simply create a character over and over again, trying to roll a good one (like people do for good nature shinies in a pokemon game? it’s not fun!)

if you’re not balancing them, has your game become pay to win? Name any game where “pay to win” actually helped the game succeed and players considered it a good thing. I don’t think you can.

how much does it cost to create 39,000,000 cosmetically unique characters?
do you really think players will be satisfied with just one character per game?
part of the reason beanie babies were collectible (that fad died FAST, by the way — just like NFTs will lmao) was because people could collect them all. If you create limited runs of characters, like, say, 100 ultra-rare Olympics 2024 Princess Peaches and 10,000 September 11th Commemorative Never Forget Toads, then you’re creating artificial scarcity that’s more tolerable than “there’s only one” but you’re still gonna have a lot of people disappointed they couldn’t get one.

Why would you want to create negative sentiment around your game?"



The other part isn't as easy to pull a quote from because the article is long. But essentially:

What happens when a piece of loot you've bought as an NFT needs to be rebalanced? Or fixed? The Telesto gun in Destiny has been broken 30 times. What happens if that's an NFT?

Sticking with Destiny, what happens if the game needs to disable content that has been sold as an NFT? Bungie "vaults" content people have paid money for due to it bloating the game size and causing technical problems. What happens if that's an NFT?

The idea that loot could go on the block chain and transfer from game to game is total fantasy. The amount of incredibly costly work to make one worthwhile gun prohibits that and then the cost of carrying that amount of game data and balancing forward into another game is far too high to be worthwhile. And the cost of transferring a gun from say COD to CSGO is too high to even bother contemplating.

It stops you from making certain games if loot has to be on the blockchain as you can't have set items in fixed places in the game.

NFTs are a dreadful scam that will eventually go away once people realise how worthless they, how broken the system is and how unworkable their fantasies about them in games are.

[teddymeow]

Do you even fungible though?

It's just a token gesture.

[dataDave]

The only thing I would say about the above is that proof of stake, much like the fabled lightning network, has repeatedly been pushed back. I will believe it when I see it.

You're suggesting that these games companies go with Ethereum for minting NFTs. That would be near-instant financial suicide.

There are plenty of other fully functional POS blockchains, such as Algorand and Tezos. Algorand comes with a 0.001 ALGO transition fee, no matter the size of the transaction. That currently converts to about $0.00197, all while being carbon-neutral/negative.

I'm not sure about Tezos, but it won't be far off that.

[fishbowlhead]

Its all just made up nonsense out of nothing, it means nothing and will eventually poof into nothing again.

As for carbon-neutral, this needs to stop even being a phrase, unless you can mine this stuff with your computer off? And transfer it with your devices off? No? Its not carbon-neutral then.

[dataDave]

It’s not mined…

Here, knock yourself out: https://climatetrade.com/algorand-pa...ative-network/

I’ll start using carbon negative from now on. You’re actively helping the environment by using it as funds are leveraged in offsetting the pumping of huge amounts of crap into our atmosphere. It’s a much better alternative to blowing up random brown people for their oil so that we can maintain value when it comes to printing trillions more $$$.

[Dogg Thang]

Yep, many of the examples dataDave gave aren’t mined. It just doesn’t happen. There are so many ways all of this might happen and that’s what’s weird about the quotes in Chopeman’s post from that article - they seem to assume things that wouldn’t happen and don’t need to happen. Does anyone think that Nintendo would ever have just one person play as Mario? That’s a ridiculous example. Does anyone think the game needs 39,000,000 cosmetically unique characters? He’s arguing against things that only he is suggesting when the reality here is far, far simpler - digital ownership of an asset gives you way more control over it. Almost none of this is in place right now and people are right that, for right now, you can be sure that what these companies are actually thinking about is how to milk some cryptobros for money but the path of actually owning the digital assets we buy, like we do with physical stuff, is not necessarily worse than the total lack of ownership we have now.

[fishbowlhead]

Mined, generated, poofed into existence, whatever you want to use. Also It certainly is damaging for the environment, the electricity used for all the crypto is absolutely outrageous and its not even widespread yet, the grids are already strained as it is. Also currencies are no longer tied to gold reserves, so no ones sending slaves into mines to hoard more gold, just precious metals to make silicone chips, so again crypto is making that worse as well.

edit. @dog thang, but stuff like nft's aren't designed to give YOU the rights over something, well on the outside but in reality not really, there just deigned to give someone else the right to sell it to you.

[Asura]

It's nice they're still doing well. I just wish they felt more... relevant to me. The reveal of a new Yakuza game feels like the only time I notice them anymore.

The diversification of Japanese publishers into the western market has definitely done this for me.

I remember there was a week where there were going to be big Square-Enix and Sega announcements, and it ended up being something for Hitman and an expansion for Total War. I knew those were brands owned by those companies but it'll never stop feeling weird when Square make a song-and-dance about news, and it ends up just being more Tomb Raider. That'll always feel like an Eidos franchise to me, and I really think Square should've maintained the Eidos brand.

[MartyG]

Having 39,000,000 items would negate the whole point anyway as it would diminish their value simply by availability making it a bit pointless if it's about game companies making money from limited items.

There's a need to separate crypto currencies and NFTs as these are different things - they share an underlying technology, which is the blockchain, you can't trade and swap NFTs in the same way as you can with crypto currencies so their use of transactions and changes in the blockchain ledger is limited, you're not mining NFTs.

As DT alludes to, having digital ownership in a public blockchain ledger gives power to the owner of the item - it's a way of storing immutable data. This sort of thing can make you the owner and arbitar of your personal data that's stored across the web too, taking that away from companies like equifax. There's movement at the moment for personal data wallets based on this technology - companies such as Inrupt started by Tim Berners-Lee may well be providing you with this in the near future.

There's clearly a lot of misunderstanding over what the technology offers and is.

[Dogg Thang]

nft's aren't designed to give YOU the rights over something, we on the outside but in reality not really, there just deigned to give someone else the right to sell it to you.

Well first, they already have the right to sell us stuff. They sell us loads of stuff. And we buy it. Selling us digital stuff is a massive market and it sustains entire companies. We don't own the stuff. We can't do anything else with it. We can't sell it on. We can't pass it on to our kids. When they decide to shut down a server, it's gone. So we're already there. That doesn't change because selling digital items is already a reality and that genie is out of the bottle regardless.

NFTs are, in contrast to your point, precisely designed to give you rights over something. And by rights I mean only ownership rights and the freedom to control where a digital asset you bought can go. It's that simple.

As Marty says, there is clearly a lot of misunderstanding of what the tech can offer. And honestly, a lot of it feels like a solution desperately searching for a problem and it's so early that people are trying all sorts of things. A lot of those things won't stick. Some of them are flat out ridiculous. But the core of what this could offer is potentially a better situation than the one we're already in.

[Asura]

But the core of what this could offer is potentially a better situation than the one we're already in.

This whole "ownership of game content" thing seems weird, to me.

To use an analogy, let's say you have a Yugioh card. For the sake of argument, let's say it's a Blue Eyes White Dragon from an early edition of the game. Your card is unique; many were printed, but none of them are your specific card, and while you can photocopy it, you can't "copy" it as such (putting aside the philosophical debate; just it would be really difficult to make a convincing forgery).

So it's yours, you own it.

But if you rock up to a Pokemon Trading Card Game tournament, you can't use it. You still own it, no-one's taken it away, but that makes no difference in this context. And if people ever stop playing Yugioh, then the card ceases to have much value. Konami don't steal your cards and burn them, but they're still useless trash.

People are talking about the idea of you having an NFT of a sword, and being able to go from game-to-game, using it because you own it, but even on a basic level that falls apart. If you're playing a fantasy epic game, you don't want the player who owns Jehuty from Zone of Enders to turn up and just bitchslap Sauron with the Zero Shift. I can certainly see some use for those Ready Player One shennanigans in a controlled context but I don't think it would ever work in a widespread way.

[fishbowlhead]

I understand how it actually works and what it can offer, and indeed what people actually want it to do in their heads. I just think people are very naïve in the reality of how it will actually be used by large corporations and what it will end up as, which will be a digital product you have ownership over but still wont be able to sell on or do anything you really want with it.

This also doesn't work in a digital space where everything can be infinitely duplicated, for a digital game for example to have value there can only really be X amount of copies, so that your copy has a perceived value on the blockchain (or whatever its created from), if there's infinite copies it has no value, as you cant physically create an infinite amount of something in the real world world as resources eventually run out, or capability reaches a limit.

@Dogg Thang, if you create 20 nft's that you assign a value too and they cannot in any way be duplicated then you can assign a value to them obviously.

[Yakumo]

NFTs suck unless it's a physical product in my hand. I know some NFTs can work like that (a digital and a physical version) but we all know it's about digital stuff.
Reminds me of those crazy sods who pay big money for a digital weapon or costume in a game.

[Dogg Thang]

This also doesn't work in a digital space where everything can be infinitely duplicated, for a digital game for example to have value there can only really be X amount of copies

This already happens without blockchain though. Every digital asset can be infinitely duplicated and yet people pay for them. People assign value to them. This isn't some new concept. It's a reality right now with or without NFTs.