this is a niche .. but you can imagine some communities and players might enjoy owning assets that are not tied to a game company. the company can fold and the game go under, and the asset can still be repurposed for another game, or held as a collectible like we do physical trading cards and stamps.

a probably simpler use case for blockchain in gaming is for a simple payment API and market mechanism .. easier to spin up a smart contract and escape payment processor fees and the ridiculous take-rates of Steam and Apple in-app purchases.

scarcity is part of these games. when you open a pack of MtG cards and one item is rare, player will tend to get pretty excited. same with a rare loot dropped in WoW. without this imposed scarcity all assets would have equally unlimited supply and the game would probably be pretty bland, and there would be not as much reason to trade cards and build a hand.

Completely false. The strategy game and the collection/trading 'game' are completely different activities, and it is extremely common to enjoy one but have no interest in the other.

I played MTG very competitively in my youth, and I sidestepped the scarcity issues entirely by either playing sealed/draft[0] in official tournaments, or by playing in unofficial online tournaments where cards were unlimited (I enjoyed the so-called Eternal formats where many cards had been long out of print and cost hundreds of euros at the time).

Pro players also tended to favour drafting - it had a reputation as the most strategic and interesting way to play - and while of course they also played in official tournaments with custom-built decks, quite a few of them were known for having no interest in collecting cards and simply borrowing whole decks from their friends who did have the hobby of trading and collecting (whether or not those friends played the game).

[0] A game mode where everybody starts with a small set of random cards, instead of bringing their collection.

it is like WoW loot where some items are rare and others are not. if all items in the game were of equal supply and scarcity, there would be no rare or coveted items. you could trade a bronze dagger for a legendary mythril great sword or whatever. after 100 loot drops from grinding you'd have 100 different items of equal rarity rather than say 95 worthless items and 5 rare items.

i guess that is a valid type of game but it seems different than most trading card games and loot based games.

True collectors do exists, but they are outnumbered 1:1000 by ordinary players who sigh and say "oh man, I'd love to play $card, it's perfect for my deck, but I don't have the money for it, this shit sucks".

Modern video games have found a satisfactory compromise by allowing everybody to enjoy the game on a level playing fields without restrictions, and then using cosmetics to bait the collectors into getting addicted, with all the dark patterns we know and loathe - artificial scarcity, FOMO, etc.

If MtG took the same lesson to heart and released every year a 'play set' where you can pay like $50-$100 to get all the new cards needed in regular form, and then had separate randomized products for collectors with a chance at shiny or alternate art versions, I'd get back into the game on the spot.

if MtG uses this model for deck building it sounds like pay-to-win.

a blockchain game can just be pay-to-own and play-to-own like most games on the App Store, except the assets assigned to the user is not attached to a single App Store account and do not involve a 30% take fee. imagine these game assets could still be held even if you switch from Apple to Google phone, because the assets are detached from your phone company’s accounts.

Because it's desirable for the publisher? Since, you know, they make way more money that way.

> if MtG uses this model for deck building it sounds like pay-to-win.

It is pay-to-win, up to a point. There is an upper ceiling on how much a top-tier deck can cost to acquire (usually a few hundred dollars, in the most popular formats), and after that point money no longer confers an advantage. That's how it can be a competitive game at all, even when you bring your own deck.

> a blockchain game can just be pay-to-own and play-to-own like most games on the App Store, except the assets assigned to the user is not attached to a single App Store account and do not involve a 30% take fee. imagine these game assets could still be held even if you switch from Apple to Google phone, because the assets are detached from your phone company’s accounts.

Very nice - for the player. Why would the game publisher, Google, or Apple want to make an effort to recognize assets from a blockchain they do not control and do not profit from?

> Why would the game publisher, Google, or Apple want to make an effort to recognize assets from a blockchain they do not control and do not profit from?

they don't and probably will not do this, unless it starts to compete with their profits. this is what we are seeing with nfts in art world, llike Christie's and Sotheby's now selling nfts, Instagram and Meta adding nfts, and now Spotify announcing they will explore nfts. these corporations see value that they can extract, in the same way opensea is extracting 2.5% on each trade and as a result making millions in profit.

if more gamers begin to use and demand decentralized marketplaces for games and assets, the major publishers will step in to those spaces as well to try and keep their foothold and avoid becoming obsolete in a new market.

People don't care how little control they have over it, the shift from having retail games in your own home to owning them on platforms like Steam (and the resistance from buying from other sources) should tell you enough.

The payment processor fees are still there though - you just pay them when you convert your fiat currency into crypto, rather than when you use the crypto to buy the 3D hat.

https://help.coinbase.com/en/exchange/trading-and-funding/ex...

edit: these fees apply both ways, selling and buying crypto, so the user also pays less. and if the user buys $100 USD of tokens like they would at an arcade, all of those tokens can be spent on the game without exchange to fiat needed. this is different than every interaction with processor taking a cut which happens now if you want to buy 5 assets from a game that uses stripe or an app store or whatever.

The only reason the fees are that low right now is because crypto is speculative, and users have no protections. If crypto is useful and buyers expect to be able to do things like refunds or charge backs the fees will do up to cover those costs.

Looking at how crypto works right now and suggesting it'll still be the same if people use it as currency is silly.

the reason those standard take-rates are high are not for consumer protection. interbank fees are about the same or lower as CEX take fees in the range of 0.1-0.5%. corporate infrastructure built on top of these financial systems like PayPal, Stripe and VISA are taking huge profits.

Can it? NFTs don't confer copyright, there are all sorts of issues with that. If the original company goes under, rights to its assets are likely to be part of either acquisition or bankruptcy proceedings.

CC-NC license also sorta works but not as well.. assets can then be repurposed for non commercial uses only.

other licenses should be developed to operate specifically on these kinds of problems. some projects are already exploring this like BAYC licensing token owners more rights.

Then who cares if they're on a blockchain?

I think it's fair to say I don't really get this artificial scarcity fetish.

the same is possible in blockchain setting. ownership of that unique token can hold value for gameplay and collectibility, despite JPG being CC0 and free to download and print out.

This is not true. Concerning "value in the gameplay", as you put it, the value is in the JPG. The "card" might have a value as a collectable but that value has no bearing on "value in the gameplay".

this is where blockchain is well suited. user can sign a message with their private key and cryptographically prove ownership where all other parties can also verify it cryptographically

> proxies are allowed in tournaments without proving anything

cool! but not what most refer to when talking about trading card games. if you have access to all cards in the game at any point there is no need to trade or do anything in particular to acquire and own a specific card except to say “I choose that.” if a game works like that it wouldn’t make sense to build blockchain based ownership around it.

Wizards of the Coast frowns on this, and bans it in sanctioned tournaments because obviously they want to sell you cards. Actual players do it literally all the time and it's not even very controversial.

It's not really any sort of level playing field at that point. Each to their own I guess.

acquiring an nft does not even need to include payment at all. assets can be distributed to users for non monetary reasons, such as some achievement or action taken in the game, or defeating some other player in a pvp battle based on a mix of skills and random chance and as a result winning their hand or rare loot or whatever. it is up to the game to decide these things.

You've literally described how games work now. No NFTs required

nfts are literally just records of ownership of a digital asset that are upheld without a central entity.

“it’s a lot like owning assets in a game” is exactly correct with the distinction that it’s decentralized

Again. Above you literally described how games already work, with no need for NFTs. Why the hell would games need NFTs?

You don't need "decentralized ownership" for something that is literally only applicable in a single game.

On top of that, the myth that people clamor for digital scarcity is also the invention of crypto bros.

similarly, some share of devs and gamers like to publish and purchase work on Itch.io, even though it’s the minority compared to Steam or Apple.

no.

Now if that will ever happen I very much doubt.

Images are hotlinked across the Web all the time, the problem is that random assets cannot be added to a game.

And the people pushing NFTing assets might have a different idea on games - e.g.(I’m open to refinements) the “game” is understood to be more heavy on game mechanics as seen in game of chess, so that 3D model of a piece can be anything, or that an asset is always a complete, tangible entity as a fully voiced and textured Companion Cube, rather than a husk of a car in the background with half of the body removed, etc.

And with that level of disagreement as deep as to what the game is, I’m not sure how we would all get to an agreeable conclusion. A chess game that allows any pieces in a Unity asset bundle as a piece sounds interesting if possible.

It's not instinct. It's an fact obvious to anyone who as much as had a tutorial on game programming.

> the “game” is understood to be more heavy on game mechanics as seen in game of chess, so that 3D model of a piece can be anything, or that an asset is always a complete, tangible entity as a fully voiced and textured Companion Cube, rather than a husk of a car in the background with half of the body removed, etc.

wat.

Ok. Let's take a game of chess, or a game based on chess. For example, Knight's Retreat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54ibEGIER-4

And, say, you have assets from Rimworld (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tDrxOASUog), Elden Ring (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3Huy2cdih0), Hyperlight Drifter (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWufEJ1Ava0) and Kentucky Route Zero (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp8f7zWwRjo)

So, tell me. How exactly will this work with "game mechanics" with an "always complete asset" etc?

> A chess game that allows any pieces in a Unity asset bundle as a piece sounds interesting if possible.

Of course it's not possible. Or, if somewhat possible, will look like shit for the majority of assets: you can't convert a 2D pixel art asset to a 3D object; 3D (and many 2D) assets will have completely different compositions, skeletons, rigs, animations etc.

I mean, I could have said that NFT believers' mental model of a game is so removed from computer games IRL, AAA and gacha and mobile and all kinds of games, that those concepts make basically 0.0E-16 sense or in case it make sense the point those paths cross is few decades away. Basically that's my thinking. But isn't that too dismissive?

It's not :) It describes the mentality exactly

Twitter, for example, allows some set of NFTs to be used on their website. Those NFTs are from a specific place (OpenSea) and follow a specific criteria (be an image).

Like that a single game would connect to some place (GameNFTs) and allow for example a user to select their chess pieces if they owned an NFT in a specific category (GameNFTs::Images::ChessSets::TypeA). But it wouldn't allow other NFTs than that.

That's what crypto bros keep telling us.

> Those NFTs are from a specific place (OpenSea) and follow a specific criteria (be an image).

So, a very limited set of NFTs from a centralised service. Got you.

> Like that a single game would connect to some place (GameNFTs) and allow for example a user to select their chess pieces if they owned an NFT in a specific category

So

- there would be a central asset authority

- that authority would oversee asset categorisation (or this categorisation will somehow be standard)

- game devs will willingly integrate with that central authority's API to find, list, and accept game assets

And the reason game devs will do that and are not doing it already is because?

I'm not a crypto bro so this is a more realistic take on how you can get actual NFTs into games. Yes, it has massive trade offs that would make the whole thing very roundabout, but I am simply arguing for that it is technically possible.

It's still not even remotely possible (except for games running more or less the same engine and implementing the same type of game like the Crusader Kings series). But even before we get to that, my last question remains: "And the reason game devs will do that and are not doing it already is because?"

Yes, and that's my whole point. It can be done, just not as general as the bros have you believe.

> But even before we get to that, my last question remains: "And the reason game devs will do that and are not doing it already is because?"

Because there is no benefit to the game developer.

Again, I am not saying it is a good solution, but displaying a PNG in multiple games from a shared location for /sure/ is possible.

No doubt you can display it obviously, but you can't ensure that it's identical everywhere, especially where the thing displaying it is implemented by separate teams of developers. PNG has built in gamma correction. It's a good example of a format that displays differently depending on where you're viewing it. Game developers would be swamped with support requests saying "My special hat NFT is just a black rectangle!"

And that's just for 2D images. If you want to do it for 3D assets... Well, trust me, you really don't.

Blockchain, NFTs, and all related ideas are about sharing data between untrusted parties without a central authority. If you're in a single game there is automatically an authority.

I'll be generous and suggest that World of Crypto is being built by some devs who are using NFTs as a hustle because they're trendy. There's nothing wrong with that. That's how you sell things in fashion. But it could easily be a rugpull scam...