Re:Bye-bye, Bitcoin: It's time to ban cryptocurrencies
by cwkoss on Monday July 26, 2021 @08:34PM
(#27967268)
That's an interesting idea. Cross game cosmetics would be especially interesting if certain items were not made available for sale by the developers, but had to be earned via in-game accomplishments.
Ex. if you kill the final boss in the game, you get a hat that you can sell, but every copy of this hat was earned by someone who beat the game.
Could be an interesting way for game studios to cross promote - if player of Game B wants that fancy hat, they have to either beat Game A or trade with someone who did, incentivizing more people to play Game A. Some number of people would be swayed in which games they chose to play if they could 'cash out' once they were done with it - even if it's only ~$20 for dozens of hours.
So this could be used to not only bring in revenue, it could alternately be structured to build audience.
I do think something that could be interesting would be to use a permission-ed authenticated append-only database (essentially like a proof-of-authority blockchain, except not necessarily a blockchain, could be closer to an ordinary database), which could allow the kinds of cross-chain trades we see in actual blockchains, which could facilitate trades of items between different games, without requiring the players trust that the other player will uphold their end of the trade on the other game, just trust that the game servers don’t cheat, as the game servers would have basically no reason to do that. I think these would be able to scale much more easily, while still being potentially compatible with actual blockchains.