EVE is the only current MMO I can think of which realizes that destroying value is also important having a functional economy, and creating those interesting economically-based dynamics
So there is a lot of competition to get a good guild trader, and guilds all bid large sums of gold to try to get a good trader. The winning bid for a trader gets the trader for 1 week, and the gold spent on the winning bid is destroyed. So it turns into a self balancing system, because if there is too much gold in the economy then the guild trader bids go up really high and take lots of gold out of the economy every week. If there is not enough gold in the economy then it isn't viable to make such a large bid on the guild trader, as you won't have any chance of making enough money back to justify the large bid, so bids go down and more money stays in the economy.
It's at this point I'm assuming you're being bitter and trolling.
Sure a better game could come out and the value of items could come down, but that isn't really any different than if people in real life decided they just liked garnets instead of diamonds or whatever. And presumably as Moore's Law slows down, winning games will stay in the front runner position for longer.
From a pension fund's perspective, you're basically just finding something that a small number of people love passionately and then hoping that as more people learn about that thing, the value of everything connected to the ecosystem increases. That doesn't really seem any different than investing in a social network like Facebook or whatever, which clearly pension funds already do (usually by allocating a small portion of their funds into VC, although sometimes directly).
Volatility.
Since I can see it coming, the fact that real-world assets have a non-zero volatility does not mean that the level of volatility in virtual assets isn't a difference in quality and not merely quantity.
What happens to your WoW diamond's investments when the next Wow expansion brings out UltraDiamonds and the latest shiny hot BiggerNumbersThanLastTime weapons and armor can only be bought with those? Again, the fact that this occasionally happens in the real world still has nothing with the routine nature of this sort of thing in the virtual.
Only an idiot would invest in Wow diamonds. Put your money into buying stock in the company running WoW instead.
Well that's the beauty of the blockchain. You just have a contract in place saying that weapons and armor can only get X% more powerful each year, so that way there is a fixed amount of inflation.
Cryptokitties is a testament to how pathetic the blockchain is as a platform for complicated games. The fact that possessing a hash representing the genome of a cat is enough to qualify as a game is laughable. I've played lots of highly simplified games that involved breeding animals and optimizing for specific traits and what cryptokitties offered was just one mechanic in an entire system consisting of dozens of interacting mechanics and MMOs like WOW go way beyond a dozen mechanics.
I don't think anyone is arguing that DLT, as it currently stands, is a complete piece of shit. But that doesn't mean that no progress will be made over the next 30 years. Especially since registering and tracking virtual items is pretty much the perfect use case for DLT.
You're too deep, there isn't any way we can convince you of the foolishness you're spouting.
Is the idea that the company is just doling out items? An artificial scarcity? Doesn't that make the market super untrustworthy if they could flood it at any time? You can't do traditional coin mining as that would remove the effort from the gameplay.
Why is it a problem that university endowments and state pension funds aren't allocating some of their investments into virtual items? It's not.
> I want to invest money into games, but I can't. Other people want to get paid to play games, but they can't. How exactly is that not a real problem?
You can already invest money into games and/or get paid to play games via a variety of methods. It seems like you're shoehorning the blockchain into the equation unnecessarily.
Besides, solution-in-search-of-a-problem doesn't mean you're failing to target real problems. It means you came up with your solution first before analyzing the specific problems you're now trying to apply it to. That's almost always inferior to starting with the problem and then working backwards to craft the perfect bespoke solution.
Almost all of the problems that blockchain obsessives point out are either (a) trivial problems that few people care about, or (b) are better solved without needing a blockchain.
You can. There are several publicly traded publishers and developers.
> Other people want to get paid to play games, but they can't.
They can. Just look at twitch or the pro-gaming scene.
What? You price them the same way you price them in the real world: domain knowledge and data.
EVE in particular has charts that tell you historical transaction amounts and volume.
Currently the incentive structure is to make a gaming offering compelling (addicting?) enough to justify a monthly subscription. If you create a two way value transfer for money/virtual items with legitimate institutions you're going to completely fuck the incentive structure. Imagine what happened with the Diablo real money auction house except now the scalpers are pension and hedge fund managers.
How is that any different than, say, these people looking for diamonds in Crater of Diamonds State Park? I'm linking to this specific guy because he describes it well: "It's a lottery ticket with exercise."
https://youtu.be/YX93NHWfyQw?t=650
Similarly, Facebook decides what content to show you based on what's profitable for investors. But for whatever problems Facebook has, it's still much more widely used than any competitors run by non-profits or whatever.