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Re:Making Sense of Web3 by dmitriid on Wednesday March 16, 2022 @06:13PM (#30704795)
> The items can be made unique and be used outside the game which increases their value.

They can't be used outside the game [1]

The only thing that "increases their value" is speculation (and scams).

[1] One person's game engine isn't another person's game engine. One game's items are not other game's items. Even displaying and interacting with items in the game that has the mechanisms to display and interact with those items cannot be translated to the world outside the game.

Re:Making Sense of Web3 by searchableguy on Wednesday March 16, 2022 @06:17PM (#30704843)
For basic sprites and characters, you absolutely can.

There are companies using it to show ads in decentralized way in the metaverse right now.

I don't understand it like you but I can reason about it looking at similar patterns in gacha and game skins. They are a digit in a database but sold for huge money and have a big secondary market.

The value of it comes from the association and possibility than immediate practical use.

Re:Making Sense of Web3 by egypturnash on Wednesday March 16, 2022 @07:14PM (#30705392)
Has anyone actually made an NFT that you can share between two games made by completely unrelated developers? Crypto fanciers keep on offering this as a usecase for NFTs despite the myriad game balance, developer time, and cross-compatibility issues it would create.

Games that are not available don't count, neither do games that say you'll be able to do it "soon". Pointing a game to an ugly monkey jpeg you "own" doesn't count either. Getting a character, weapon, costume piece, companion, etc, in one game, and transferring it to a completely unrelated game does count.

Someone in the crypto ecosystem working on a framework to make it easy for a game developer to allow import/export of game items as NFTs in a standardized way halfway counts.

Re:Making Sense of Web3 by dmitriid on Wednesday March 16, 2022 @06:29PM (#30704959)
> For basic sprites and characters, you absolutely can.

Ah yes. We went from "items in the game used outside the game" to "basic sprites and characters".

Define "character", by the way.

> There are companies using it to show ads in decentralized way in the metaverse right now.

And this has anything to do with the original statement?

> I don't understand it

This is the key sentence, and you should have started with it.

> looking at similar patterns in gaccha and

Gaccha: Gaccha, alternatively spelled as Gachchha, is a monastic order, along with lay followers, of the image worshipping Murtipujaka Svetambara sect of Jainism.

Wat?

> game skins

What game skins?

> They are a digit in a database but sold for huge money and have a big secondary market.

Yes, and this has literaly nothing to do with their usefulness outside the game they were built for.

Example: Fortnite skins are built specifically for the Fortnite game engine, using textures available for that engine, applicable to skeletons and meshes designed specifically for that game engine.

How exactly are you going to use it outside of Fortnite's game engine?

> The value of it comes from the association and possibility

Translation: speculation, scams, and tricking people out of their money.

Edit: I mean, there was a huge public outcry because of EA's lootboxes. No cryptobros want these loot boxes everywhere and pretend it's a good thing.

Re:Making Sense of Web3 by kemotep on Wednesday March 16, 2022 @06:59PM (#30705238)
By gaccha they likely mean gacha as in gachapon. The Japanese capsule toy machines. Many loot box video games are sometimes referred to as skinner boxes[0] or gacha games.

I definitely agree with your assessment that most crypto/web3 stuff these days are terrible ideas.

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

Re:Making Sense of Web3 by exdsq on Wednesday March 16, 2022 @06:47PM (#30705114)
I see this argument a lot and all it makes me think is general sadness people are so defeatist about something that's hardly brain surgery. If people can't work out a way to share a skin between games when they both want to then I understand why AAA games are so boring nowadays outside of a couple studios.
Re:Making Sense of Web3 by dmitriid on Thursday March 17, 2022 @02:37AM (#30708290)
> If people can't work out a way to share a skin between games

People can work it out at great expense to developers and at the risk of destroying whatever a game is stylistically.

Again, each game will have its own ways of presenting, combining and displaying objects. A game with highly detailed human-like motion will be radically different from a cartoonish game. A game designed with large textures in mind will not work well with small textures. A game with complex physics will be completely different from a simpler game in how it represents, handles and combines objects. And so on, and so forth, ad infinitum.

Brushing this aside betrays how little you understand of this.

By way if example: websites are completely open systems. You can go in and see all the "assets and objects and items". Websites are also manny, many orders of magnitude less complex than a computer game.

Go ahead, copy a website's CSS and paste it into another. Or copy a chunk of a website's HTML and paste into another. Doesn't work, does it? You can reflect on why that is.

On top of all of that, why would, say, developers of Elden Ring want to allow you to bring in assets from Horizon Zero Dawn or Binding of Isaac? Those are completely different games with completely different stylistic choices.

> I understand why AAA games are so boring nowadays outside of a couple studios.

Ah yes, they are boring because you can't use skins from Fortnite in Shadow of Mordor. That's the reason.

Re:Making Sense of Web3 by pavlov on Wednesday March 16, 2022 @07:07PM (#30705317)
It's more difficult technically to share game assets than to have everybody use the same JavaScript framework. At least in JS-land the engine is the same for all, and yet people can't find any agreement on how exactly to use it.

(I haven't yet seen web3 proposed as the solution for JavaScript framework proliferation, but I'm sure it's just around the corner...)

Re:Making Sense of Web3 by exdsq on Wednesday March 16, 2022 @07:11PM (#30705347)
For sure! But what I mean is if NFTs catch on then there's no reason to imagine Unity/Unreal/Whatever won't create a standard for them that allows game developers to easily integrate them into textures/skins/etc. It's not some impossible unsolvable problem unless you don't want it to work.
Re:Making Sense of Web3 by kemotep on Wednesday March 16, 2022 @07:19PM (#30705427)
Is it good game design for every game to look like Fortnite where everyone is running around as a character from a different media franchise?

What does it add to Halo Infinite if Deadpool is a playable character in it? Especially if the developers and publishers do not make money selling you a skin that you bought some place else.

Re:Making Sense of Web3 by exdsq on Wednesday March 16, 2022 @07:28PM (#30705494)
No idea! CoD just got an Attack on Titan skin, Halo Infinite has some questionable skins that could definitely become franchised, Gears of War 5 has a few Halo Skins in it but I assume they were built from scratch. Online games seem to be going the way of cross-franchise skins to entice people to pay for cosmetics. All my point is I don't believe it's technically impossible as people seem to suggest.
Re:Making Sense of Web3 by kemotep on Wednesday March 16, 2022 @07:59PM (#30705772)
I do not think it is technically impossible if you specifically design for interoperability which NFTs seem like a reasonable first iteration of that idea but it might not be financially reasonable. Even if it is, then it would just be boring if not immersion breaking to play the same character in every game, at least to me.
Re:Making Sense of Web3 by dmitriid on Thursday March 17, 2022 @02:44AM (#30708327)
> won't create a standard for them that allows game developers to easily integrate them into textures/skins/etc.

What standard? A skin in a game is not a shitty ape jpeg that you can right-click to download. It's a 3D model designed for a specific game. Other games will not have the same models (and nor should they).

> It's not some impossible unsolvable problem unless you don't want it to work

Go and work on it then. So far you've shown exactly zero understanding of the problem. You clearly don't even understand what NFTs are.

Re:Making Sense of Web3 by exdsq on Thursday March 17, 2022 @11:02AM (#30711899)
It might be worth mentioning I was using ERC-721 tokens in 2018 and worked on one of the top 10 chains for a few years, before that I worked with Unity but for architecture (digital twins) rather than games. So I’m not a total novice here.
Re:Making Sense of Web3 by DaiPlusPlus on Wednesday March 16, 2022 @06:26PM (#30704919)
> For basic sprites and characters, you absolutely can.

Or just offer an image upload feature in their own app and/or website?

Re:Making Sense of Web3 by searchableguy on Wednesday March 16, 2022 @06:31PM (#30704977)
I think the second part of my comment answers it.

The value comes from the association. A baseball hat worn by a famous person is worth more than if it is worn by a normal person even if the hat is the same physically.

If you directly use nft from the chain in some big project, the value of that particular receipt will go up because the association can be made. This cannot be done if it was simply a digital image copied over.

Re:Making Sense of Web3 by dmitriid on Wednesday March 16, 2022 @06:34PM (#30704997)
> If you directly use nft from the chain

You can't "use nft". Nft is a crappy recipt that tells you that you spent some money. That is it.

In the absolute vast majority of cases the actual asset is some blob of data stored on a company's server somewhere.

Since we're in a subthread about using game items outside the game for which these items were specifically designed, good luck using your "nft" in "some big project".

Re:Making Sense of Web3 by searchableguy on Wednesday March 16, 2022 @06:50PM (#30705149)
NFTs can be more than a receipt. It depends on the contract which is programmable and can store state.

For example, you can store game state on the chain and generate a svg based on that state which is returned to an external application if they fetch the nft.

There are few examples of it I can dig up if you are interested.

Re:Making Sense of Web3 by DaiPlusPlus on Wednesday March 16, 2022 @09:57PM (#30706690)
> you can store game state on the chain

At great expense, yes.

Back in 2017, it cost approximately $76,000 per gigabyte to store data directly on Ethereum: https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/a/896/17413 Now it's multiples of that (i.e. millions of USD per gigabyte).

Of course, that's fine, because Ethereum is not meant to be a data-store, that's where IPFS and FileCoin come in (with their own "proof-of-storage" scheme to sister Bitcoin's world-destroying Proof-of-Work). IPFS should cost less than 1USD per gigabyte while reads are "free" - though I'm unsure how well this will scale over-time. Also, AFAIK, IPFS isn't immutable/append-only storage.

Re:Making Sense of Web3 by dmitriid on Wednesday March 16, 2022 @07:00PM (#30705251)
> NFTs can be more than a receipt.

They can't. Again. Context: game assets/game items.

Good luck storing any game asset/item on (any) blockchain.

Re:Making Sense of Web3 by exdsq on Wednesday March 16, 2022 @07:05PM (#30705292)
Crazy idea but couldn't a game include the asset but an NFT in a wallet associated to a user account allows them to actually use it?
Re:Making Sense of Web3 by dmitriid on Thursday March 17, 2022 @02:39AM (#30708304)
I couldn't parse this statement
Re:Making Sense of Web3 by exdsq on Thursday March 17, 2022 @12:15PM (#30712775)
Say Call of Duty and Battlefield decide to introduce cross-game weapons. Both games add the weapons as per usual. A user can use one of these weapons if they have the NFT in their wallet (I assume both games have some integration with the wallet). The NFTs are tradeable off-game so there's a CSGO style marketplace - all that matters is if, when you load the game, your wallet has those NFTs. It needn't even be cross-game to be honest, you could do it within the CoD franchise but still allow people to buy and trade class load outs. It could be cosmetic skins for the weapons too - it's not crazy to include limited-availability skins. Why might they do this? Well you turn a loot box system into a collectables system which could drastically increase sales if there's a chance you could not only get a rare drop but make money trading that drop. Do I want this? No, not really. Could it be profitable? Yes. Is it technically feasible? Yes.
Re:Making Sense of Web3 by dmitriid on Thursday March 17, 2022 @06:11PM (#30716419)
> Say Call of Duty and Battlefield decide to introduce cross-game weapons.

Yes. Let's say that. Please walk us through how this would work on a technical level, since you are "not a total novice here".

Re:Making Sense of Web3 by exdsq on Thursday March 17, 2022 @07:54PM (#30717165)
Say Amazon Gaming runs a promotional NFT for an MP5 across both CoD and Battlefield. CoD and Battlefield teams both implement the MP5 and include them as a legendary drop in Lootboxes. If you get the NFT in either CoD or Battlefield it automatically unlocks in the other game. How? Link your EA/Activision account with a third party wallet like Ubisoft with Digits. That's just a bit of integration code. When you load the game look at owned NFTs for weapons in the wallet and unlock them in the game for the user. NFTs can be resold so a user might now sell that NFT to another user. On reboot of the game it won't detect the NFT so the weapon is now locked, with the opposite happening for the new owner.

Why would CoD and Battlefield want to introduce NFTs in lootboxes? By having a resale/collectors market on-top it'll drive sales.

Why would Amazon Prime invest in having these sorts of promotional items? They already do in Apex Legends with skins.

Why would Activision and EA want to have cross-game NFTs? Item longevity would inflate the price of the asset again increasing sales of lootboxes for collectables.

The perk of Web3/NFT for these things over say the CS:GO store is you get a lot of that for free within the ecosystem - for example storefronts. Also you don't have to handle payments yourself! And there's a whole world of additional meta one can include to NFTs that you can't get with game assets. For example, and yes I know this is stupid, if my solution above was implemented I could also add a derivative CFD of a Gamestop share in it as a 'Charged NFT'. Why? Fuck knows lol. But maybe someone will come up with some cool features in the future. It's just something that's unique to NFTs and shows additional functionality. (https://www.charged.fi)

> Go and work on it then.

I try work on important things and I don't think video games are that important, albeit they're fun.

> So far you've shown exactly zero understanding of the problem. You clearly don't even understand what NFTs are.

> since you are "not a total novice here"

I don't appreciate your sarcastic tone to be honest, I am not sure if it's intentional or not but you comes across as a jerk with your confrontational attitude.

Re:Making Sense of Web3 by dmitriid on Friday March 18, 2022 @03:31AM (#30719495)
I skipped all the mmagical and hand-wavy description of how magical NFTs magically give you magical abilities to use something.

That's not what I asked.

Walk through the technical steps to implement this: "CoD and Battlefield teams both implement the MP5 and include them as a legendary drop in Lootboxes".

> I don't appreciate your sarcastic tone to be honest, I am not sure if it's intentional or not but you comes across as a jerk with your confrontational attitude.

No, I just don't suffer fools gladly. So far for every question and comment showing your complete lack of understanding how anyting in games works.

Re:Making Sense of Web3 by DaiPlusPlus on Thursday March 17, 2022 @03:01PM (#30714692)
Call of Duty is Activision.

Battlefield is EA.

What you're proposing is about as likely as Apple adding Windows and Android support for Airdrop and Universal Control.

Re:Making Sense of Web3 by exdsq on Thursday March 17, 2022 @03:12PM (#30714811)
The initial complaint was that it's technically impossible, I just gave two random options but even within CoD it's still possible to have tradable items from lootboxes.
Re:Making Sense of Web3 by dmitriid on Thursday March 17, 2022 @06:20PM (#30716515)
> even within CoD it's still possible to have tradable items from lootboxes.

Yes, it is. What do cryptocurrencies or web3 or other random crap has to do with them?

Re:Making Sense of Web3 by exdsq on Thursday March 17, 2022 @07:45PM (#30717100)
Well for one, it lets you have a store with txs and accounts for free with little code! It’s like a framework for money, and would let you trade items across games so for example I could buy a gun in CoD for a party hat in RuneScape or whatever.
Re:Making Sense of Web3 by dmitriid on Friday March 18, 2022 @03:33AM (#30719501)
> lets you have a store with txs and accounts for free

1. Not for free

2. This doesn't even begin to answer my question.

> I could buy a gun in CoD for a party hat in RuneScape or whatever.

No, you couldn't. Explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30708290