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Comment by Tepix | Hacker News Reader

Sure, it's a limitation. But working around limitations or using them as a core element is a standard thing during game design.

So perhaps you have a game where you play for several hours or even days and only then eventually you want to save your progress on the blockchain for the world to see. Just an example.

As seen with CryptoKitties the high transaction cost is a crippling factor right now, on the other hand the game wouldn't even be possible in its current trustless design without the blockchain.

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>on the other hand the game wouldn't even be possible in its current trustless design without the blockchain.

Is it really a “trustless” game? If the company folds and the website with it, sure you still have your “CK Tokens” in your wallet, but without the centralized platform you can’t exactly access the picture of your kitty, you can’t breed, you can’t sire, you can’t gift...in other words you can’t even transfer the “CK token(s)” from one wallet to another without the platform. Therefore it seems there is a whole lot of trust the platform will continue to exist, not to mention the value of the kitties is constantly subject to change, not just on a free market basis, but based on the rules and prices which are unilaterally set by the centralized company.

If you want to, you could put the UI on a p2p filesharing network. That's the ultimate goal of Ethereum's "web3" plan with Swarm, and probably could be done now with IPFS.

If you want to, but the company behind CryptoKitties doesn't want to.

The smart contract that performs these actions still exists and anyone can (and some people like me do) interact with it without touching the website UI / front end. The pictures of kitties are easily recreated once you have all the secrets of the genome, which we do (well, there could be more secrets but we could recreate the ones we know about which is all we can/could care about). The legal aspect of that latter part is murky but the CK devs promise they are working to clarify despite the complexity of this new space.

Yeah the game would lose 99.9% of its potential userbase without the front end, but if the remaining 0.1% wanted to build a new web interface we could and the game could go on. This may seem similar to spinning up a legacy WoW server, but the difference here is that we’d still have our own actual kitties and no be able to cheat the system so the game integrity remains in the blockchain version.

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