Shuji Utsumi, Segaâs co-CEO, comments in a new statement that there is no point in implementing blockchain technology if it doesnât make games âfunâ.
I have never been able to figure out the answer to this, so maybe someone here knows: exactly how does one implement blockchain technology into a game, and whatâs the purpose of doing so? Like in terms of actual gameplay, whatâs it supposed to achieve? Is there a valid reason youâd want to include it?
Thereâs no reason, and there never, ever, ever will be. Ever.
Thereâs a temptation for a lot of people to shrug their shoulders and admit to themselves that itâs a complicated topic outside of their reach, but itâs honestly not. Like any technology, thereâs two sides to it: the implementation and the execution. The implementation is admittedly quite complicated and even honestly a little cool if youâre a techie, but the execution is very simple. We know itâs an append only database with a fully public history. Thatâs all it is. So ask yourself how you could ever make that an interesting part of a game that would entice players to ⌠anything really. At best/worst itâll be used to introduce artificial scarcity and value which most people who just want to have fun playing games arenât clamoring for.
But more to the point, anything stored in a database needs to be actionable by a governing body. In terms of videogames, this is the game itself. The game is the authority on what can and canât be done with the data stored in the blockchain, you canât change the rules of the game, theyâre hard coded. So why bother having it publicly available on the blockchain at all? Sorry, not sure if Iâm making my points clear enough, but does that follow? Thereâs zero benefit to the public blockchain vs. an internal database because the game is the final authority and going to action on it the same either way. Owning something on the blockchain is useless, anyone who knows anything about games at all always knew that line about transferring items between games is total BS.
Any cryptobros already furiously typing out a response, donât bother. Iâll argue any worthwhile points you might try to make, but Iâve heard most of the arguments before and they just donât even bear responding to so ya know âŚ
The only plausible use case I could come up with is if a game company earnestly and legitimately wants to allow but outsource a real-money marketplace. As a cost saving measure for their own benefit.
If e.g. Diablo allowed legendaries to be owned based on an NFT, offered zero opinion on its legitimacy, said âwhelp nothing we can doâ to customers losing their items to scams or accidents, and didnât add any smart contract taxation or other shenanigans, it could work.
It wouldnât improve the game for the players, but it would finally be a legitimate use case that improved something for someone without being a pixellated ponzi scheme.
What do you think about arguments for using it in cross-game âmetaverseâ type trading? Itâs another buzzword but it would make centralization of the data hard to impossible.
My intuition is weâre seeing the first wave of snake oil salesmen adopting Animal Magnetism Quantum Whatsits to Manifest your Holograms who poisoned the well and drove everyone away, then in 10-20 years someone will have a good idea using it at which point the scammers are no longer around to ruin it for everyone. What do you think of that idea?
Thereâs no value in cross-game sharing of assets, nether for the developer nor the players.
When the game dies so does anything of value related to the assets themselves. The blockchain will probably die too. Someone one day resurrecting the game is a pretty flimsy reason at best to justify all of the negatives that come with blockchain in games, because 2 decades later it wouldnât matter anyway.
Itâs still an entirely implausible scenario. Thereâs too many hypotheticals here to even properly argue this as âcross-game metaverse tradingâ is kind of hand wavey in how it would be implemented at all, but getting back to the core issue of centralization just being a mask for trust and authority. If thereâs truly no trust between the parties, which would be extremely odd of them to set up a giant cross-game metaverse in the first place, it would be better to have an agreed upon third party trustee host the data. Or each host their respective data with an API for others to access it when needed. And ultimately, the final authority lies with each game itself on how it implements that data. They can read whatever data they like off the blockchain, but how itâs implemented locally is their final say, the game can warp that data or ignore it in any way it wishes. To say nothing of what that data looks like. Does the blockchain contain the entirety of the model, texture, and stats for all games implementing that item? Does that lock the schema in place at inception? How do new games enter the metaverse then? What about bugs? What about balancing of stats and economy across multiple games, itâs hard enough in one. Are all the games similar in nature? How do you implement an AK-47 from a CoD-like game into a fantasy MMO?
The whole premise is nonsense.
Itâs all just buzzword bingo.
We can use the blockchain to track ownership of in game items!
Thatâs just called a database. Databases on a central account server are several magnitudes more efficient. Using blockchains for this is stupid.
You can transfer game items from one game to another game!
This would be a ton of efforts on part of the devs, and even then it wouldnât really work in most cases because it turns out different games are different games. And even when it does the player experience of being handed end game items when starting a game is also questionable. Even if blockchains for games catch on, this idea never will.
The entire point of the blockchain is to create a decentralised zero trust database, but even if there are legitimate use cases for such a thing (which Iâm not convinced of myself), games arenât one of them.
The reason the blockchain pops up in games (and everything else) is that cryptocurrencies have an extreme illiquidity problem and the crypto âmillionaires/billionairesâ need new fools to buy cryptocoins so they can turn their illiquid cryptocoin âfortunesâ into actual fortunes. This is why NFTs exist, this is why Axie Infinity (which is just NFTs with a terrible game built around them) exists, and sometimes they also dupe established companies into motioning something in the direction of âthe futureâ (every crypto game project by an actual game studio).
Thatâs just called a database.
Thatâs the rub. Eventually blockchain will be useful for tracking ownership of things like land and cars, whose current ownership is tracked by an analog token minted by a a validator and stored offline (which is to say, the government has a piece of paper on file). I recently bought a house, and I had to buy mortgage insurance in case it turns out that 50 years ago someone fraudulently or mistakenly sold this house to someone else when they didnât actually own it, and then I bought it from the guy who bought it from the guy who bought it from the guy who bought it from the guy who bought it from the guy who sold it illegally, so itâs not really mine. Blockchain will eliminate that. Game companies mint tokens to represent digital âassetsâ that they say you âownâ but in reality itâs the asset creator that can make more of the asset, destroy the asset or deny others usage of the asset (which is the real, functional definition of âownâ).
Iâm still working my way through my thoughts on this after Bored Ape Money Pit but I think that blockchain is one of the infinite number of ways that traditional ownership models are trying to impose themselves on digital assets when itâs the fundamental nature of digital assets to be infinitely replicable for a cost so low as to approach $0/per, and to make it very hard to exclude people from having or using these replicas. I work in software. Weâre getting to a point where the real value in software is in designing ways to stop people from using it unless theyâve met certain conditions (usually, having paid for a license). Most of what I do is authentication and authorization. That is to say, determining who a user is and what theyâre allowed to do. These are external, artificial controls. In real life when you eat an apple the apple is gone. When you and your family live in a house, that house is full of people. When you âeatâ (or in some other way extract the value from) a digital apple that apple can still be there. An infinite number of people can exist in one digital space via instantiation without ever having to acknowledge one another. Digital assets defy exclusivity, and without exclusivity their canât be ownership. So what we end up with is a million people who have the same bit-for-bit perfect picture of a monkey, but one guy who has a certificate from the monkey picture center that says heâs the âownerâ of the monkey picture when ownership doesnât really confer any rights, privileges or abilities that everyone else didnât already get for free.
Iâm not sure I agree with your mortgage insurance example.
The problem isnât record keeping, but answering the question âif you use an asset as collateral for a loan to purchase that asset, what happens to the loan if the purchase is invalidatedâ?
Block chain might make title searches easier, but it wont have any impact whatsoever on the existence of a legal system that can independently audit and invalidate contracts after the fact.
The asset isnât digital, so ownership canât be enforced digitally.
The current system is a pile of digital databases and paper records that need to be checked before sales can happen. Actual questions or disputes are handled by the courts. Block chain canât change that, only change the underlying way we store the data.
The thing is - how will your blockchain-based mortgage be enforced? What happens if I start squatting on your blockchain-property? At the end of the day, the answer is âpeople with gunsâ - we agree that contracts have legal weight, and there are legal structures (and ultimately law enforcement and their threat of force) that keep you on your land and me out of it. And if we already have to involve all that, what good is blockchain doing that âa databaseâ canât do?
Yeah Iâve been wondering the same thing too, like whatâs the point? Iâve seen some devs try to use blockchain for tracking ownership of items, so you could trade/sell items to others and it would all be tracked and verified through the blockchain. But if youâre playing a game thatâs hosted by a centralized server, then just use a database. I donât see any benefit for a decentralized blockchain when youâre playing on a centralized server.
There isnât a use case. They created a product and keep trying to shoehorn it into any industry they can.
The only justification Iâve ever been able to think of is PokĂŠmon. The idea is supposed to be that every PokĂŠmon is unique but thereâs actually only a limited set of variables to define each individual âmon. I can trade you a Zubat I just caught and it can be identical to one that I first caught in Fire Red twenty years ago and have traded through every game since.
If each PokĂŠmon was truly unique and on the blockchain, it could be meaningful in ways they currently arenât. There could be only one Coalossal that Wolfe Glick won the Playerâs Cup with. He could trade it away for charity and someone would pay for it. I could trade PokĂŠmon away and track them as theyâre traded around the world.
Itâd be cool. But it would not meaningfully make the game more fun. And itâs Nintendo so theyâre never going to do blockchain. And that is the best pitch I can give you.
And even then, you could still do that unique Pokemon idea without using a blockchain. Use unique identifiers in a good old database, or, heck, just tell the user with words, âthere are many pidgeottos but this one is yoursâ.
A blockchain idea has to not only be a good idea, but also not possible with simpler technology for it to be genuinely worthwhile.
Iâve got to give you credit, this is the first time Iâm hearing of a situation where blockchain actually serves a purpose in a game. Itâs a pretty niche scenario, but yeah it would add some value in this case.
So basically if something in a game (item, character, account, etc) needs to persist beyond the game then blockchain could be a solution. You could probably still do this with some kind of traditional database, but maybe blockchain has some technical advantage?
Yeah, this is a solid use case situation that actually makes sense to me, since right now even unique Pokemon can be cloned and traded - I have a number of cloned event Pokemon in my collection, because they were events held in geographically impossible locations, and generous players distributed them online.
But I suppose thatâs why, even though using blockchain to enforce uniqueness on Pokemon is a genuine use case that I can see the potential value of, thereâs elements of it Iâd hate if they were implemented. Iâve never been a huge fan of artificial scarcity, and using blockchain only makes sense if artificial scarcity is to be enforced. Right now, Nintendo seems to disapprove of cloning event Pokemon, but generally turns a blind eye to it outside of the official competitions.
So itâd definitely be a trade-off. Is it worth knowing for certain that your Zubat is 100% unique, if it also means that you can never âcatch 'em allâ because an event-only Pokemon was only available at an event 300 miles away?
The most successful example for a blockchain game is âAxie Infinityâ which is something of a PokĂŠmon-like. It used blockchain technology to track the unique âAxiesâ (= PokĂŠmons) which could be traded and sold. So the blockchain was used to do just that.
The big promise of games like âAxie Infinityâ was âplay-to-earnâ, games which allowed players to earn money through playing the game, such as trading in âAxie Infinityâ.
Could this only be done with blockchain? No. All of that could technically also be achieved by other means.
So ultimately all of the talk about the blockchain was mostly PR and a way to distinguish the game. Nobody would have cared about it, if it had not had this feature. Which is very representative of all blockchain games.
The talk of how blockchain technology would allow players to transfer items from one game to another; or create unique characters which could be transfered between games; etc. have always been pipe dreams, They would have required a level of cooperation between publishers and developers of games that was simply impossible to achieve.
As a footnote: The use of blockchain in âAxie Infinityâ ultimately resulted in an in-game economy that was largely a pyramid scheme. The game is still there, but the economy imploded and most players only ever made cents, if they earned anything through the game at all.
That âplay-to-earnâ system ended up just being a means for people to exploit others in poorer counties to grind countless hours in the game for a pittance.
Simple rule of thumb; any time someone says blockchain in a sentence, replace it with âbig slow databaseâ. Now you can think about it clearly.
Thanks, thatâs helpful! Iâve had a lot of really good responses from everyone about various use cases for blockchains in games, but âbig slow databaseâ does seem to sum up most of them remarkably well!
Ofcourse itâs a over-simplification since itâs actually an âappend-only geo-distributed database with non-centralized controlâ but the former works quite well when talking with people who want to sell me blockchain.
I always ask them what is the problem that a standard DB canât solve that a blockchain can and they stumble a few steps.
Itâs only purpose is to monetize your gameplay time with some kind of real world âvalueâ.
Everything else is just the lies they tell you to get away with enshitifying the game.
Youâre not wrong, but MMOs have been enshittifying the gaming experience by selling in game items in a shop for decades. Many even have player trading systems which inevitably create a real money black market for the game. While most donât legitimise this in the way blockchain games do, thereâs no technological reason they couldnât, only legislative ones.
The only thing the âblockchainâ part actually does is allow you to add another buzzword to your project and company, as well as make all of this cost a lot more electricity.
Itâs mostly hype from the marketing team pushed onto developers. 90% of use cases of block chain are just over eager MBAs pushing developers to add blockchain so they can be excited about it.
For this, itâs probably NFTs, which are guaranteed to be unique, but⌠the cool thing about blockchain is that the guarantee is true even in a decentralized service. A video game company is centralized, they can make whatever they want unique already. So itâs 99% likely to just be a buzzword.
There are some really good uses of blockchain. A decentralized steam-like platform would be amazing. A decentralized venmo/paypal. The ownership of a game would be great to have on a blockchain so even if a company goes out of business you can still say you own this game. Any game mechanics themselves are stupid.
A decentralized venmo/paypal.
This was in fact the original purpose of cryptocurrency. The seminal Bitcoin white paper is titled âBitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash systemâ.
There are a few ways to do it. As one mentioned, trading of in-game assets. Additionally, some games want to become âPlay to Earnâ. Essentially the more you play their game, the more buttcoin (made-up coin to use for this conversation) you earn which then you can trade somewhere for real money. Itâs like when you play CSGO for years and end up with 350 dollars in steam from selling all those free cases they just give you at the end of a match so you end up buying a steam deck for essentially free⌠So going back to blockchain, essentially, actions in a game can get you more or less coins. Like you are playing a buttcoin miner.
So Iâve seen a few storefronts try to implement this for all games in their store. That way if you play a game, you earn buttcoin, take that buttcoin to buy a new game.
Utsumi is right though. Buttcoin implementations will not make a game more or less boring. Itâs an economy system implementation and most people donât find the economy as a fun thing.
Those play to earn games, unless there is some weird magical source of outside revenues, are all convoluted ponzi schemes, though. The only money coming in is from new players (it takes hundreds or more dollars to join Axie Infinity, for example). You can earn real money while the game is growing, but as soon as growth stops, the whole system collapses
Itâs not really a ponzi scheme when it comes to cryptocoin because they just keep minting more. They are literally printing money. So they donât need a source of money. This isnât me advocating for such games at all though. They are usually trash. I can see a world where something like WoWâs gold system is tied to a cryptocoin and thus the money you earn in WoW gains more direct real-world value. Of course, itâs something like 0.00001 of a US dollar but itâs something.
Only uses I can think of is having an actually finite currency - as blockchain was conceived to solve the problem of digital currency double-spending - or of complete unfungibility - in creating unique items that canât be double-spent either, so theyâre truly singular. For that last one, it could be something like your character too, which could make federated MMOs a fair amount easier to create.
Either way, canât appear to understand where the value could lie in games without extremely sophisticated social dynamics that stretch a very long time.
One reason to include blockchain tech in games is to enable trading of in-game assets without needing to build a trading engine from scratch. It also offers the chance to tie in-game assets directly to real-world values, and have certain assets be useful across games in a franchise. Basically everything Magic The Gathering or PokĂŠmon does, except that you donât have to worry about the cards deteriorating as you use them.
Once you realize that Magic and PokĂŠmon were just cardstock NFTs all along, the whole idea of NFTs in gaming start to make more sense. Not every application that the the Crypto Bros propose to solve with NFTs are really appropriate, but some are.
TCGs use fungible resources, though. Except for very rare cases like misprints or limited releases, two cards are completely interchangeable so long as theyâre the same card. I could maybe see Pokemon using NFTs because theyâre supposed to be your special semi-sentient animal friend, so making them non-fungible is a natural progression. Theyâve approximated this with IV and PV, but ultimately you can still clone your shiny pikachu with hacks. An NFT pokemon could have a personal history on the blockchain (battles/contests won/lost, grooming/play sessions, parental/trainer involvement, regions theyâve seen, battle partners theyâve had, etc etc etc) which affects its behavior in subtle ways that simple numbers canât achieve. You could do this without NFTs using a centralized service, but I given the radical backwards and forwards compatibility of the games decentralization might make it a lot simpler to implement.
Note too that this is a strictly non-financial application of NFT. You could potentially exchange money out-of-band like you would in selling a card, but it doesnât require the pokemon cost anything. If I were to implement it, Iâd probably avoid calling it âNFTâ like the plague because itâd pull in cryptobros like a swarm of locusts and ruin the fun for normal people who donât want to pay $3000 for a Zigzagoon.
but some are
In a way, maybe, but not in a way that it solves a problem in a novel and useful way. It solves a solved problem in a worse way.
I wonât necessarily dispute that.
If Blockchain tech really did solve a gaming problem in a unique way, it would be done under the hood, in such a way that developers and modders could use it to add value, but casual gamers wouldnât even realize it was being used. However, itâs harder to get funding based on buzzwords that way.
