Steam bans all blockchain and NFT games on its platform
theverge.com
theverge.com
Steam will likely try to capitalize on it when it becomes an even bigger market by either introducing their own marketplace or token or something else.
Why allow money to go out when it is almost yours anyway.
I'm trying to think what "many benefits" those might be... can you clarify?
...and I'm being honest because I don't think any court in the world has ever acknowledged an NFT as proof of ownership in any dispute.
An NFT is "ownership" of a hash of the work, with no actual rights attached thereby.
Usually the more scummy ones you see are limited piece PFP collections with rarity traits etc. The OGs( cryptopunks) where interesting as the first NFTs to be ever made but the current churn is just hype. Besides that the more artistic generative collections like the art blocks curated are interesting. Most of the big pieces are in the collections of people that have no intention to ever sell them. Some are experimenting with online galleries of shorts.
Basically throughout the whole hype bubble with nonsensical projects( crypto is the definition of fuck around and find out) there are some who are exploring some cool artistic stuff. Personally I never understood high art so I'm staying out of it.
Also don't get caught up on the prices, these are priced in Eth, not $$. Eth was $80 a couple years ago and a few cents when it launched( and yes I do know people who have held eth since way back then). When something appreciates so fast it makes sense that some people are more willing to spend it in such ways.
They're actually relatively simple. If you want to see some of the more complex NFT ecosystems that are really pushing boundaries, see Loot and NeoTokyo.
https://variety.com/2021/biz/news/wme-signs-pixel-vault-1235... -- WME has signed Pixel Vault, an IP business dedicated to drive value to NFTs. The agency will grow Pixel Vault’s catalog of IP beyond its established NFT business into other areas including film, television, podcasting and gaming.
3rd party writeups: https://zeneca33.substack.com/p/letter-12-punks-comics
https://www.futureproof.xyz/post/pixel-vault-quick-take-on-t...
1. A way to pay the artist directly for the work/effort being made (and against the counter-argument of "you could always buy a painting/physical artwork, its much better and would also be helping the artist" there is the: i don't need another "physical" artwork - my home is already littered as is; i just like to contribute and give money to people that are doing cool things and NFTs allow me to do that in a clear direct way)
2. NFTs bring a simple way to find and monetize/create value around previously hard to value/commoditize art domains like: interactive art, generative art and iterations - around authority sites like hic et nunc et al (now i can for the first time peruse common places that serve NFTs and fund/incentivize certain art styles that were previously out of the generalist/mainstream art market - previously how would you pay for a generative art and immediately have the creator reach you out for a conversation over its style and substance?)
3. An immutable receipt that i paid for it (which can be anonymous, but still it is good to have)
here is a bonus point that I personally don't find it as cool, but still worth a mention:
4. There is a whole after-market movement for these immutable receipts, look for it, people are cool, friendly and creating new amazing things with an incentive that is stronger than ever to produce new digital trendy objects (some you can even interact with, some might change whenever they get accessed, some might even freely stop existing at some point in time... its crazy ahah)
hope this helped in any way
2. The monetization of art is a heavily controversial topic and a lot of artists rightly think that patronage is a much better system to exist under since it provides a more reliable and stable income.
3. Paper is pretty immutable generally speaking. I don't think NFTs will actually significantly impact issues around long term art providence with both laundering and forgeries still remaining prominent. Additionally, almost all of the art world already supports publicly anonymous transactions to protect purchaser privacy.
4. I think there's some interesting stuff in this realm with interactive art - but I think there are ways to accomplish much the same thing with conventional sale processes.
I fail to see the point here.
Are you speaking for the ones that like to support cool art or against them? are you speaking for the artists? or just generally against NFTs as an alternative tech innovation to a current existing problem?
2. With nfts the monetization of art is at least one step less controvertial than current approaches and does not exclude or goes against patronage (which is always a valid non-exclusive approach that can coexist with and along nfts)
3. Paper can be stolen, can be destroyed and is not public by default (it stays in your pants pocket while they go to laundry)
4. Good for you ;)
Axie Infinity just recently raised $152M at a $3B valuation, and it's not going away. People from the Philippines are making a livelihood out of this game, and that is so powerful I can't even put it into words.
The genie is out of the bottle so to speak, and the entire world is going to get into P2E games and the metaverse sooner rather than later. If Steam is really serious about not entertaining this, there is a HUGE opportunity for a new contender to come in and disrupt them by allowing blockchain-based games. WebGPU + WebAssembly in particular is a fascinating way to deliver binaries without having to go through walled gardens, and you can today hook these games up wallets like Metamask. I'd go as far as to say a meaningful part of web3 will be decentralized gaming on the blockchain.
That just sounds like CryptoKittens
> Axie Infinity uses NFTs for the rights to each pet that is purchased. To grow these pets, you purchase or farm SLPs, or small-love potions. You can sell these pets or SLPs for cryptocurrency, then swap into your respective currency.
I don't see what's novel here, the game was intentionally designed to store inventory/assets with NFTs. It sounds like these people are farming in-game items and selling them to other players (whales). It's literally just gold farming in wow except allowed by the developers. Any other game that lets users trade their inventory for crypto (to prevent charge backs if you were using paypal etc) could also do this without NFTs.
I wouldn't want to play a game that allows gold farming, because then the metric of your progress isn't how much time you've spent playing, but just how much money you've spent on it.
They may be a big business, but its not clear at all that it is th kind of business that Steam wants to be in. Just because a business opportunity exists doesn't mean a particular existing incumbent business in a different field will transition to engage in it.
I do believe we'll eventually see integration of digital assets into the platform, but I believe that will absolutely be the case with all major platforms.
No way a gaming company wants to do this... in every country they operate in.
Not to mention, that gaming platforms have been used in the past to launder money, so it's not even a stretch to assume that would be happening.
I'm not sure I'd go so far to call them an outright scam, but they're highly fragile assets that likely won't stand the test of time.
I would be interested to see if someone is working on implementing NFTs in a way that I can feel confident that the digital art will remain provably attached to the NFT for decades and centuries in future.
I'm thinking something more like a hash of the artwork embedded in the NFT directly rather than just a link to it. That way, even if the link breaks, you can still prove that a piece of digital art belongs to the NFT.
Is it correct to say that an IPFS address can only point to a specific piece of data, and re-uploading that data will generate the same address?
Technically I believe the answers to those two questions are, respectively, “no (because hash collisions are possible)” and “yes (because the same content will always have the same hash)”.
And worse, the host of the image could theoretically change it on you and you'd have no way to prove (at least in a trustless way) what the original image was.
there are well respected projects that are fully onchain such as cryptopunks and autoglyphs
Love Steam, but you can do your own distribution pretty easily these days. If they want to miss out on the next platform evolution, that's a mistake they'll have to reckon with.
I don't see it affecting the NFT gaming market one bit.
All of this sounds completely dependent on the game designers, which is the opposite of decentralized, no? What requires NFTs? You can't just "bring" something into another game.
Isn't that kind of the point of NFTs? With an NFT, you hypothetically could bring something into another game. You'd need different developers to agree to recognize certain NFTs, though.
I think the better question to ask is the reverse: what requires bringing things into different games? Historically, nothing. This doesn't seem to be a thing most developers want. And if they don't want that, there wouldn't be a point to implementing NFTs, since they're already keeping things centralized.
So it's really just a philosophical discussion about the idea of things being tradable between and outside of particular games, and the potential merits of that, rather than a technical discussion about NFTs.
I'm picturing the initial sell as like those old Pokemon events or trading via the link cable, but you could buy a Trabant P601 from Gran Turismo, Zhongli from Genshin Impact, and Messi from FIFA21 to drop into the game too.
How do you make use of that sort of open-ended diversity without ruining gameplay? You'd either be limited to trivial uses (avatars/skins or randomizations) or you'd have a huge vector for feeding in game-breaking items and characters. The alternative is a closed network-- only allowing a small selection of pre-vetted NFTs that won't break the game, which adds very little value over something like the Skylanders/Infinity/Amiibo concept that already exists, except you don't get a cool figure too.
As an example, if someone has a Runescape party hat, they could equip that on their world of warcraft character.
Even if you did have game items transferring across totally unrelated games, you'd _want_ a centralized database to make bug fixes possible. After all, games as a class of programs aren't known for being bug-free.
But then if it's licensed that freely, what's to stop world of warcraft just using it in general? Put it on a bunch of NPCs. Let any player put it on their own character.
Or does the license have some sort of restrictions - 'you may only use this asset as a hat on the player character of the person who owns this NFT'? How's that enforced?
Seriously, WHY would WoW go to the trouble of supporting this nonsense?
I reckon it’ll mostly be cosmetics but who knows. We’re still early.
The most similar thing I can think of is like gravatar images - as a blog comment section it made some sense to let people bring their ‘identity’ with them in a low trust way.
Sure, that kind of interest alignment can exist in games but if everyone’s cooperating there’s no need for a system like NFT to enforce the rules about who gets to use what cosmetics.
At a minimum, there would need to be a known (to the asset developers) stable asset description format to target, covering both the cosmetics and in-game mechanics of the items, for every game the asset would target.
For it to work, game developers need an incentive to open their multiplayer games to third-party assets and asset developers need an incentive to target games they don't own with assets.
1) world of warcraft can incorporate the party hat asset
2) world of warcraft chooses to implement a mechanism where that hat can only appear on a character whose accountholder has authenticated as 'owning' the NFT that points to that hat
then yes, that could happen.
But... why would they do that?
Why would they not just rip the hat and put it up for sale in their own store for anybody who wants to pay them for it?
This is actually not that trivial from a technical standpoint and takes a lot of time and money to maintain.
First Runescape would need to set up and hire a team to maintain uptime on a few public facing web service servers and define an item status API. They'd need to integrate this web service into their backend infrastructure to give live updates.
Second World of Warcraft would need to write some custom code to read these party hats and their owners from the Runescape API and also maintain a way to link Runescape and World of Warcraft accounts so the right people get them (OAuth2 would likely do well here). WoW would also likely need to design the system to fail gracefully when Runescape servers are down.
This is just for read access, if WoW wanted to let players trade these hats then the Runescape API at least doubles in size and now includes synchrony assumptions and complexity in case players try to trade at the same time in both games. Not fun.
Alternatively Runescape could just make party hats NFTs and players would hold them in their own wallets. WoW would write a handful of lines of standardized code to read the NFTs from the player's wallets and display them in game. Allowing users to trade these items would also just be a few lines of code and would work seamlessly across these two (or more) games. Ethereum also has 100% uptime and the reliability allows designers to create a simpler system overall.
It's the difference between weeks/months and a few days of work on the development side. It's also more standardized and compatible with all other apps when using ERC-721.
Meshes with different LoDs, textures, animations, skeleton weights for physics? (I mean, obviously you want your party hat to flop around realistically when your character emotes, right?)
And WoW is going to take this arbitrary untrusted asset from a player-provided NFT, and... load it into the WoW client of every other player who is near the player.
Yeah, that sounds like a terrible, terrible idea.
The content moderation aspect (textures covered in swastikas or porn?)... the possibility of players providing meshes that are ridiculously large or complex... the security attack surface...
This does not sound like 'just implement a few lines of code and you're done'.
there are primitive games that are building on top of other projects' nfts because it's a way to secure an initial audience.
in the absence of licensing restrictions, the nft owners are incentivized to prefer projects that provide utility for their nfts.
Ok, but the supposed benefit was to a game's prospective competition. Why in the hell would the game developer want to license content created for their game to be used in a competitor's game?
> in the absence of licensing restrictions, the nft owners are incentivized to prefer projects that provide utility for their nfts.
And everyone who doesn't have those NFTs have no such incentive. Even if I own game X's NFTs, there is no disincentive for me to play game Y that straight up uses game Z's NFTs for free. Or hell, even if it used game X's. I might want to play with an item I don't have in game X, after all.
If a game came out tomorrow that reused TF2's hats and shit, do you really think anyone would consider the fact that they have hats in their TF2 account a disincentive to play the new game?
This is like that part in HGttG[0] where the Golgafrinchans decided leaves were currency and burnt down the forests to ensure their scarcity. I have no idea why you people can't see how mad you all are.
[0] In case anyone doesn't know: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.
imagine you paid a few hundred or thousand dollars for the hat, you'd be strongly incentivized to call the games that aren't contributing back to the ecosystem freeloaders. and as for everyone else, there's a thin line between not caring about the artist getting paid and piracy, and i suspect there isn't a whole lot of money in the segment anyways.
your last analogy makes no sense.
Alternatively, a game could also offer SFTs (semi-fungible tokens, as described in ERC-1155 [1]), in which case players could trade multiple identical versions of some indivisible asset. Something like a skin or a hat would be an SFT unless only one copy of it existed (i.e. only one player could ever use that skin or hat at any time).
NFTs = typically (and at a low level arguably always) non mutually interchangeable, aka unique.
(The problem with NFTs in this analogy is that transferring car titles has legal weight, while selling an NFT probably doesn't without additional contractual language.)
Think about it, a much smaller fish could offer a very similar game that uses the inventories of NFTs from GameA and become a serious threat to the business of GameA overnight by sniping the player base with the promise of keeping their inventory.
It is also a design challenge. One of the design benefits of a new game is you can cancel, rework, or nerf strategies that players spent money on in the previous game.
So I could build this infrastructure on mongodb/dynamodb in a single weekend, offer it without $$$ minting/gas fees, still get higher margins, point out my solution is green, and offer my simpler solution to game devs, and everyone will be better off.
“ NFT games such as "Axie Infinity" and "NBA Top Shot" let people earn money by grooming and selling animal characters called Axies, which players treat as digital pets. […] They will then groom these Axies, team up with their friends and make Axies do battle like Pokemon, and build so-called "virtual kingdoms."“
In any other game the characters you develop are essentially the _same_ as any other character played by any other player—maybe with the exception of the character name which you could personalize.
I can appreciate the notion that you can develop a character which can be uniquely identified.
Without devolving into a philosophical argument about games simulating reality, I’m thinking you can see NFTs as a fundamental change, because NFTs offer a unique player experience. If Eve Online creates a unique experience by allowing players to create corporations, then NFT character is a unique experience at the individual player level.
Unique digital assets are compelling like baseball cards
https://www.techtimes.com/articles/263796/20210805/how-do-nf...
That's something that I believe is currently a big issue in our society, so many things are pushed between black and white. You can definitely see the advantage of both system and use both in their own when one is better than the other. The fact that you see potential in a decentralized value transfer system and want it to evolve doesn't means that you believe every single thing need to be decentralized. I'm sure you downloaded something using P2P, yet you are still enjoying centralized file distribution everyday too.
Not only that, but Steam doesn't require any exclusivity or dependence to their platforms. That means that as a publisher, you can share it on multiple platform, which make it essentially decentralized...
> Sweeney: We aren’t touching NFTs as the whole field is currently tangled up with an intractable mix of scams, interesting decentralized tech foundations, and scams.
[1] https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/144251952287594906...
pretty hypocrite, considering they have a p2p marketplace, which does exactly that
NFTs and crypto are explicitly supposed to have real-world value and uses that are more or less completely divorced from their use in these games. If you delete the game, the items themselves still have the majority of their purpose.
Whereas for the things on the p2p marketplace, their value is entirely predicated on the game they exist within.
Given Steam is a games platform, I think it is pretty straightforward for them to want to keep non-game-related stuff away. Even if it's just from a pragmatic point of view: as weird as it is, lawyers and accountants at this point are very familiar with how to handle users trading in-game things. Pulling in things that exist sufficiently in real life to be in danger of being considered a security is absolutely a big departure from what Valve is used to supporting on its platform.
The reason they are doing this is so they do not become a money laundering platform.
It also gives them a complete monopoly on their internal marketplace, so that's a nice bonus.
>Will you be asking me to provide tax information to you, and/or will you be providing 1099’s based on my transactions in the Community Market? No. Previously we required that U.S. citizens and residents provide us with certain information, including name, address and social security number, prior to exceeding 200 separate sales transactions in a calendar year. We have concluded that this information is not required and we will no longer be asking you for this information as part of Community Market participation. We will also not be providing IRS Form 1099’s with respect to sales activity in the Community Market.
With that in mind, it seems like you can money launder fairly easily, right? I thought that the 1099s were the primary blocker to that.
What you quoted is specifically for less than 200 transactions in a calendar year. The implication being that any account involving 200 or more transactions in a calendar year will need that information.
Which brings about two points.
1. Exactly how much money can someone launder buying < 200 csgo skins in a calendar year (are we arguing that they're paying $50k per skin?), and 2. How exactly does the idea that they've decided to take on some risk to decrease friction incompatible with not wanting to deal with NFT's, which *COULD* conceivably go for $50k a pop.
1. Create an asset flip game with steam trading cards.
2. Generate steam keys and give to bots
3. Bots farm the cards.
4. Convert the cards to steam gems.
5. Buy legit cards with gems.
6. Sell legit cards on Steam Marketplace.
7. Buy sought-after game on Steam.
8. Sell game on the gray market for real money.
Let me know if I messed up any of those steps. It's been a few years.
Can people still trade guns outside of CSGO?
I suspect OP is being sarcastic.
Not if you're the developer of the game.
Very low, perhaps. Each bot cost $5 in order to trade. That's an upfront cost, and can be reduced if they buy their asset flip. A certain number of Steam keys can be generated free by the developer. Asset flip games might be near free, depending on the assets. Developer accounts cost money, but again that's upfront. Bots can farm in VMs. There's money "lost" on Steam and gray market trades, but that money never really existed. Yes, it takes lots of time, but it's automated and scales decently.
Now people set up ways where the game is “gifted” to an email address where you copy the claim url and send that to the purchaser instead of a key.
For example the Garrys Mod Steam gift goes for ~9€ [1] while the key goes for ~16€ [2]
[1]https://www.g2a.com/garrys-mod-steam-gift-global-i1000000439... [2]https://www.g2a.com/garrys-mod-steam-key-global-i10000004391...
Also gems have absolutely horrible conversion ratio. I think lowest I can find in my inventory is 6 gems per copy of game. You can sell gems for 0.30€ per 1000... So 167 copies. And accounts...
Not to forget that it cost 100 dollars I think to release game on Steam...
Obviously it's about control and understandably so because letting uncontrollable financial transactions happen within applications on your platform sounds like a legal nightmare waiting to happen.
It's basically just a next-gen version of the star registry scam that's been going on for decades. [1]
The latter is not extrinsic at all - it's all in the contracts on the blockchain.
I will grant it is slightly possible if we have a data destruction period between now and the 27th century. Claims to property after the nazis were overthrown could often be made by jewish residents with very little proof due to the fact that all the real proof was intentionally destroyed. But even those could end up extremely contentious. You can read up on Jewish Restitution[1] and you'll see a lot of really difficult cases that had to be dealt with.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_claims_for_restitution...
The existence of your stock ownership depends on a legal and social framework to exist. If the government was overthrown and you were exiled tomorrow, you have nothing. If an asteroid destroyed half the earth tomorrow, and you survived, you still have nothing.
You take for granted the systems in which you live and function in. There are many things we "own" and cannot touch, yet they are as real as anything. The money in your bank account is an example of that. It has value, you own it, but if we are stranded on a deserted island with no electricity or wifi, it ceases to exist to us.
That's true for most things we own these days, and it works quite well.
That's a great metaphor, but the issue is that NFTs are an order of magnitude more fake than stocks, money, etc.
Oh, that's the sports collectibles trading card industry.
NFTs on blockchains solve the problem of provenance and permanence.
You need to do a bit of effort and think about why anything is worth anything at all. Why is the Mona Lisa worth millions but a forgery worth nothing, even if they are indistinguishable from one another?
How much is a museum map from the Louvre with directions from the entrance to the current location of the Mona Lisa, signed the museum attendant worth haha.
They are of course distinguishable. One was actually physically created by the artist.
The images the URLs point at are 100% exactly identical, and you do not have the right to the image in question. You may not even have the right to display it to anyone.
You're just buying the plastic sleeves the baseball cards come in without the card itself.
> NFTs on blockchains solve the problem of provenance and permanence.
[edit] Not really no. After all the provenance is on faith that the person who originally sold the NFT is both the original creator of the work (or authorized to sell it) and that they have the legal right to do so, probably, who even knows.
Trust me, the judge is the judge of that, not the blockchain. Blockchains only actually work for concepts wholly encapsulated by the blockchain. Art is not that.
And as for permanence, no, it's just a URL. The contents may disappear, even in IPFS.
Art is represented and encapsulated by data.
The judge of provenance is society: whatever the buyer deems necessary to prove legitamacy is what sets value. An old rolex with papers is worth more than one without. A rolex that can't be identified as authentic by anyone is worth nothing.
An old Rolex with papers is worth more than without, but the papers without the Rolex are worth nothing. In this case you're just buying the papers.
Yes, you're starting to get it. You're not buying art, you're not buying legal rights. If the data was written directly to the blockchain, then it is permanent. But even if it points to some temporary host, big deal, the file itself wasn't the valuable part. Data can endlessly be replicated and rehosted.
It is the genuine provenance of an artist that was bought and traded. It is proof representing a work, whatever that artist declares it to be. They could simply resell it again for all anyone knows, but that would hurt them and devalue all their future work.
All value is abstract.
The papers without the Rolex can be worth anything anyone wants to pay for it. Following that rule I suppose fake papers can even be worth something, but most likely not.
Your blockchain will not be there in the future. Permanence? Not so much.
It is a decentralized network that has faced the test of government, natural disaster, organizational and technical risk, etc.
So no, maybe blockchains won't last "forever", but neither of us enough information to confirm either way. My bet is on blockchains outliving everyone typing on this forum.
Except that nothing about the asset is actually stored on a blockchain.
The Tate is the owner of the following certificate of ownership by Sol Le Witt:
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/lewitt-a-wall-divided-v...
Are they the victim of a scam?
Instead, draughtsmen will simply recreate it according to the instructions of the artist, as given in the diagram, at a new location.
See for example https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/lewitt-wall-drawing-113...:
"Wall Drawing #1136 can be installed, removed, and then reinstalled in another location, as many times as required for exhibition purposes. As such, there can also be periods of time in which the work does not exist in physical form."
For starters, let's take the Autoglyphs (https://www.larvalabs.com/autoglyphs): the smart contract gives a list of instructions for each piece that you can use to draw the final output.
Cool concept or scam?
How is the mode of ownership of this wall drawing different? The physical piece can change or disappear. What matters is who is recognised as the owner of the artwork an immaterial sense, as evidenced by the certificate.
The owner cares about the piece of paper but not because the typography is so sweet. The piece of paper is not the artwork. The piece of paper is a token.
"A glyph can be created by anyone who is willing to donate the creation fee of 0.20Ξ ($769) to our chosen charity, 350.org."
No, the glyph can be created by anyone who runs the code. And the code is publicly available. The "donation" is completely unrelated to the glyph, yet they try to trick you into thinking that both are connected.
The certificate will still be valuable even if the copyright on the work expires. If the artist would work with say WeWork to reproduce this work across their offices, the certificate still has value. The Tate is still able to resell that certificate.
It's actually not clear to me that Sol Le Witts estate could enforce a copyright claim on an "unauthorized reproduction", since describing a drawing in words is not the same thing as actually drawing it. But regardless, the copyright question is entirely incidental.
There is a reason why the guy didn't just drew the damn lines himself, and why his such an influential figure in art history. It's precisely because he intended to interrogate some of these ideas.
Note that even if we suppose your way of thinking about this, in terms of a license grant that will move over to any would-be buyer of this certificate, is the correct one, that means this certificate shown above either a) grants such a license implicitly, or b) a separate license grant is communicated somehow. In both cases, this is still exactly like an NFT, where artists often communicate licenses to buyers of NFT certificates.
https://images.ctfassets.net/662nae7q8cm6/38DaHNDnz0epPreBMr...
That's a signed statement, from the artist, stating that the drawing in question was created in accordance with the instructions.
Does such a certificate have value of its own? It depends on whether somebody is willing to pay for a certificate stating that a particular drawing (which may no longer exist) was created according to the instructions. So, maybe yes, maybe no. I don't know why you think this is important though.
Does a certificate of authenticity make sense in the case of a digital image? No, because we can verify the authenticity ourselves by calculating the MD5 sum of the copy and comparing it to the MD5 sum of the original. We don't need to pay a trusted third party to do that for us, we can do it ourselves for free.
You misinterpret the practical workings there a little bit. The Tate will not need to buy another certificate if they choose to exhibit the drawing once again, by hiring draughtsman to paint it on a wall once more. It doesn't refer to a specific installation. The number of the wall drawing on the certificate refers to the design, not the physical object.
Nevertheless, even with your interpretation, you could ask why a museum would want to pay for an artist to provide this kind of certification.
I'm writing this from Frieze Art Fair. There are a number of video pieces here which you can buy. They'll give you a USB drive. They will pinky swear to only sell one of those, to you. And they'll give you a certificate of authenticity. Its supposed to certify that this isn't just a copy of the video that you made. Which isn't to say that you can't make a copy and give it to your friend. She will own the same bits. But only yours is authentic, because you have that certificate. That is what is meant by authenticity.
It's a system the art world has experimented with for a while. These kinds of certificate-based works don't sell that easily either. Much easier to sell a painting. But it's the same system as an NFT and not more or less scammy than that.
A certificate of authenticity does make absolute sense in the case of physical art (provided that it actually certifies the authenticity of the work, of course), because physical copies are all slightly different. Therefore people may want to tell those that are original, i.e. made by the artist or under their supervision, apart from those that are not. By contrast, there is no such thing as an original copy of some digital information, because a piece of digital information isn't put together by any individual that could claim to be the author of the copy. Even if they could (which they definitely cannot), all copies are identical and impossible to tell apart one from another. Then, what would a certificate of authenticity be certifying exactly? Nothing. It's just a ploy.
A ploy that all actors willingly are signing on to - artists, galleries, and collectors. No one is misunderstanding what is going on. People are selling the certificate on the artificial assumption that it represents the art somehow, but you are buying the piece of paper.
W
> The way The Currency works is that collectors will not be buying the physical artwork immediately. Instead, they will pay $2,000 for the NFT and then have a year to decide whether they want the digital or the physical version. Once the collector selects one, the other will be destroyed.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90657113/damien-hirsts-the-curre...
They agreed that the current manifestation (signed URLs to JPEGs) are scammy, but that is one use of the NFT concept. In gaming, NFTs can represent in-game items with utility and unique attributes that change as you use them. They can be used across multiple games and sold/traded on an open marketplace.
I hear this a lot, but it really makes no sense to me.
An in-game item is really only suited for the game in which it exists. What good is a CoD FN FAL with certain balance, certain damage, certain bullet velocity, certain balance - in Minecraft? Anywhere else really?
Game creators go to extreme lengths to make their games balanced and fun and engaging. Opening up the ability for people to port in legendary weapons from unrelated games seems like the last thing game creators would want, and certainly, it's the last thing I'd want as a player.
Am I missing something? What's the draw?
Then if there's only one source for items, and only one place to use those items, you've got what we call a centralized system. Why would the game creator then want to give away the revenue from such a marketplace to "the blockchain" when they can just do it themselves and have a far more lucrative business model?
I don't think the point is that this is settled and will definitely work, but there are interesting applications for NFTs and games.
More generally, has anyone built an application which accepts, in some nontrivial sense, NFTs generated using another application?
What are the incentives a publisher/developer has for putting anything on a blockchain?
Company B wants nothing to do with Company A's digital assets, and Company A does not want to make transitioning away from their own game easy.
NFTs will never be used in gaming, outside of gimmicks (and all the current attempts talk more about the NFTs instead of any form of actual gameplay.)
Very probably their primary motivation. I'm pretty sure NFTs will be allowed back in as soon as they figure out a way to skim 20% off of every TX.
I guess as always, I am looking for benefit of NFT/chain solution over simpler non-NFT/chain solution. I hear persistency, but in this case I don't see it in practical terms.
A smart game producer that sees a NFT-based game go down could say "hey, you know all those items you had on <game X>? Come over to my game and you'll get <benefit> based on that stuff!" Since ownership of the token is publicly visible and not locked into Game X's database.
It could also be used by anything else, really.
Lots of ideas where cross-game promotion could be done using NFTs to validate ownership of something in Game A within Game B without requiring the game developers to set up a specific intergame data link.
A lot of these suggestions fall foul of the same problem that they offer a great deal for the customer but not for the game maker. Which whilst altruistic is rather naive to commercial reality.
A value add model like the Amiibo would work better but again is predicated on developers actually capturing some revenue from supporting it.
If you ignore that NFTs are basically a glorfied registry for micro transactions.
This is like buying a $200 refill cup from a movie theater then being allowed to use it at a competing movie theater chain, except the cup isn't real. It was never a good deal, and there's no incentive for theater's to join in.
One of the big changes in the way I've viewed this is because the blockchain we're talking about already exists. A lot of the technology is already there so over time the idea of creating a new shared database and managing it becomes more work than just using some libraries and an existing shared database - even with limitations.
> A value add model like the Amiibo would work better but again is predicated on developers actually capturing some revenue from supporting it.
Selling the game, surely.
And that technology exists does not make a notional use of it something people actually want or need. The reason for a lack of co-marketing isn’t a lack of technology as the parts of my post you didn’t quote note.
This is not a solid business plan.
I feel like most of the NFT arguments I've read in this thread are assuming that somehow using an NFT gets you out of the cost of actually spending the art & dev time on producing the cosmetic - just because it exists in another game doesn't make it appreciably any cheaper to add to your game.
I will admit there are ways to make art more "valuable" by actually limiting the number of available copies - but that trendiness is hard to effectively harness. Beanie Babies took off in the 90s and everyone's brother started buying up newly released ones... almost all of which were worthless because they scaled up their production to meet demand - and if they hadn't they wouldn't have been easy to get a hold of.
So, its good for a competitor to the original game developer. What motivates the original developer? If they want to bootstrap a new game feom an old game user base and purchases DB, they can do it without a public database of assets while excluding competitors from the same opportunity.
Otherwise what's to stop multiple games trying to adopt the same group of NFTs?
> Otherwise what's to stop multiple games trying to adopt the same group of NFTs?
Nothing at all. Breaking data out of small silos into one large database opens up possibilities like this.
Anyone can mint an NFT to point to anything. There's no guarantee beyond what's traceable on the blockchain. Once the NFT "points" to something outside of the blockchain, then all bets are off.
they hardcode a content-addressable url (eg. ipfs). there's no domains to take over.
I feel like you're on the cusp of a penny drop moment here with blockchain
And I'm really not sure what you're getting at. This particular use of NFT is as certificate of unique ownership. That's what the original buyer thought they were obtaining.
Now - maybe they shouldn't or maybe they were deluded - but that's currently how NFTs are being marketed.
Isn't it?
Maybe they're all games you made, maybe they're all games built in a community, maybe it's a fan made extension of another game. Those all have reasons you may want to add access to something based on data from another game. Perhaps it's a core mechanic, where puzzles are only solvable by completing tasks in other games. Perhaps it's just letting you play as Guybrush Threepwood if you've played the first Monkey Island.
It doesn't have to be all within games. Gated access to communities perhaps (a speedrunning discord if you've got a certain achievement).
The ingenuity of game devs never ceases to surprise me, and sharing data between programs is fundamental to lots of interesting systems so the idea that sharable data between games provides no utility is odd to me.
I've worked in the gaming industry. Margins are incredibly tight and the timetables are usually extremely brutal. It'll take time to support different character models and swappable cosmetics have, on multiple occasions, resulted in game exploits. One of the early notable ones was Oddjob in Goldeneye[1] but you also often see clipping bugs where tall characters might clip through no pass boundaries and either insta-kill themselves or find a way to get out of bounds. These things have costs.
1. https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-08-23-21-years-after...
Also, bear in mind that you still need to cook all those meals (or, rather, do all the art for those cosmetics). And if you're making art you probably want your normal players to be able to give you money for it as well... and you might not want to give it away for free to players just because they supported this other company that's not you.
Why is this better than just "Come over to my game and get all the benefits that everyone gets, even if you didn't play <Game X>!"
> A smart game producer that sees a NFT-based game go down could say "hey, you know all those items you had on <game X>? Come over to my game and you'll get <benefit> based on that stuff!" Since ownership of the token is publicly visible and not locked into Game X's database.
So... Game X has enabled competitors to steal their customers by not using their own database. What exactly is the benefit here? If it's the same company they can just use their own database.
What if Game X and Game Y decide they don't get along and start to flood the network with items that are worthless in Game X and EXTREMELY VALUABLE in Game Y? There are so many reasons you don't want to cede control of your game world to a competitor company!
> Lots of ideas where cross-game promotion could be done using NFTs to validate ownership of something in Game A within Game B without requiring the game developers to set up a specific intergame data link.
Oh good, all we need is for all games to define their item data on a universal scheme that fits the needs of every single game.
This means if it’s a popular NFT, multiple games can support the asset by building support for it in game.
Additionally some games already have carryover content - it's rather rare but a good example is Total War: Warhammer - where DLCs from the first game also applied to the second game (i.e. allowing you to play the Wood Elves in Mortal Empires). The reasons these things are rare is that, except for some limited circumstances (like in TW: WH it was the same dev and publisher) you're usually cannibalizing your own sales to boost some other game's revenue which is just weird.
But people don't want Steam achievements: they are chasing the excitement, that's chasing the money, that's made by wash trading gifs.
That kind of microtransaction garbage is already ruining many games without the need for this NFT nonsense on top of it. The only people who want more of that are the people who think it’ll make them rich.
I think it is a generational gap thing. I myself (40 year old) play CS:GO quite a lot (I'm really bad at it as well haha), but don't care about all the stickers and other custom stuff that people buy there.
However, there's a huge market for those stickers. And there is people that really like spending money to "own" that stuff. I feel that my generation (X/xenials and older) don't have a strong sense of "digital property" (in the end, we grew at the time of napster, kazaa, edonkey, and downloading copies of anything digital. At the same time "games" were owned physically through NES, SNES, Gameboy, Genesis cartridges )
But for Millenails/Z, digital property comes more naturally and they "feel" the "ownage" of digital property.
Also how is buying an NFT money laundering exactly? Especially if it's done on the blockchain, this seems to be the ultimate in traceability if it's done with ETH, which invariably it will be.
I agree about the monopoly part.
This deal is getting worse all the time!
But it seems to me you just don't like NFTs. Most people who buy them know exactly what all this is about. If NFTs were "deceptive" in some ways (and of course there are always projects with 10K bot followers that aren't legit),then I'd agree with you. But I think for NFT people, it is what it is.
An NFT is just a digital certificate stored on a blockchain. It's certainly not a scam and has perfectly legit uses.
For a variety of reasons, everything related to blockchain is ridiculously overhyped. What should be boring accounting technology is suddenly a pop culture fad, and that birthed thousands of get-rich-quick schemes.
It's a flaw in human behavior though, not a problem with NFTs or cryptocurrencies.
But hey, many have seen their friends have success in crypto while they've remained on the sidelines.. and they don't like it.
They'll defame blockchain & nfts to no end rather than attempt to seek understanding.
Intermediary-less digital ownership is incredibly powerful & will only grow in usage & utility by open-source evolving nature, perhaps exponentially.
Bitcoin was technically interesting. Whatever your stance on all the negatives in the real world, everybody agrees its elegant in theory. It combined problems to create a solution. That's what real innovation looks like.
NFT's as 'investments' are a scam. Claiming Git commit hashes as property is not valuable, innovative, or game-changing. From the bottom to the top of the pyramid its people who are salty they didn't make more money in 'crypto' and are afraid of missing out twice in their lives.
I can show an nft that represents a role, access to an event, a cross-game asset, as a property title, as a binding contract, rights to use intellectual property etc.
In theory, yes.
> It's a flaw in human behavior though, not a problem with NFTs or cryptocurrencies.
If you find another lifeform besides humans to market NFTs and cryptocurrencies to I'll buy this argument.
Just because scammers jumped all over it, and even if most NFTs are scams, that does nothing to overwrite the fact that there's a useful technology here, albeit with a niche purpose.
The problem is that people are using the hype to scam, that's human behavior, not an issue with NFTs themselves, which are just boring certificates.
I know it's possible, but I haven't seen any.
For NFT's this is even worse, because they not only claim to be magic internet money, they also (often) claim to represent a real world object or artwork, so you basically have two overvalued markets reinforcing one another. An NFT does not represent a ownership over anything more than the NFT itself unless it also comes with legal and/or physical possession of the thing it supposedly represents. If it comes with legal or physical possession then the NFT is not the core of the transaction, is it?
In theory an NFT is just anything on a blockchain that cannot be equally substituted. In practice it is a way to hype and scam.
Of course, you buy a house, not a deed. The fact that people are hideously misinformed about NFTs isn't a problem with NFTs though. It doesn't make any sense to me to blame the technology for people's ignorance.
The question I was asking (and perhaps I should have been more clear): If I'm not buying the house (I can't live in it), and I'm not buying the mortgage (as in a bank would), and I'm not buying a picture of the house (as in having exclusive rights to an image), but I am buying a hash of a specific image of the house, is that not a bit crazy?
And if you think it is but think there are better usecases for NFTs then I'd advise changing the acronym for your use-case because for me and a lot of other people NFT equals either scam or bubble. The term is tainted.
Is the concept of digital ownership a scam?
If so, why?
Digital ownership only works for things that 100% stay in the digital realm, and even then it's not a guarantee.
It's "ownership" of something without granting you any of the perks or rights that usually come with that.
It's not even exclusive ownership - because, while you have exclusive control over your particular token, there is nothing that keeps some other entity from minting another token and declare that it symbolises ownership of the same asset that is symbolized by your own token.
I think NFTs do have some interesting properties. The ownership of the token itself is indeed exclusive - this is enforced through the blockchain. Moreover, token ownership can be verified by software, without any human involvement. This could enable some moderately interesting use-cases, like resellable digital assets: You could imagine an online game where each character is bound to an NFT. You can sell the character by selling the NFT - and the game can restrict access to the character to the current owner of the NFT.
But this doesn't seem to be what's actually done: Instead, NFTs are simply declared to symbolise "ownership" of some real-world asset, without having any kind of actual connection to that asset.
I bequeath to you digital ownership of this string. Let's imagine hn is an immutable forum. It represents a block of gold. What are you going to do with it?
This makes no sense. It's like calling the very idea of an Oracle database is a scam. NFT's are basically a consensus-driven shared database, that can be used for legitimate reasons or for scams.
I can't imagine that a game would ever be improved by having a blockchain waste my electricity as opposed to just having an efficient database store the same data on AWS.
Realistically, these are all just scams, and they aren't trying to improve games at all.
This is just like bitcoin in 2011.
Bitcoin at least has theoretical uses, although practically it is definitely a negative force in the world. Their current price does not logically make them useful.
What about games, or art?
If I buy a print of and associated license to art, I gain the legal ability to look at and resell my copy the art.
If I invest and buy the copyright to something, I can sell the above rights to others.
If I pay to record on a blockchain my ownership a hash, I gain...nothing. I guess I could brag about how I paid money for a hexadecimal string when no one else was willing to? The theoretical advantage is that I can try to pawn it off on someone else for more money by convincing him that he can do the same to someone else.
If I buy an NFT, I gain the defacto ability to resell my copy the art.
The IRS sure seems to think that I owned bitcoin.
An NFT is not a "copy of a the art". That's the part that you got wrong.
That's quite confrontational, if this topic is making you upset I'll refrain from continuing.
> If I buy an NFT, I gain the defacto ability to resell my copy the art.
and telling you exactly why I think your statement is wrong. Why do you think this is confrontational? This is a discussion forum.
Since it's not actually a copy, there's no first sale doctrine license to the copyright, making it illegal to have a copy of the art unless you have a separate licensing agreement. And if you do have such an agreement, that's the thing giving practical value.
You and I can agree that a rock represents your car, but I'm still not going to pay you for it.
This is why no one is buying and selling digital artworks, except using an artificial concept of ownership - a certificate. The artworld has done it with paper certificates for a long time; NFTs are the same thing.
You seem confused. A certificate does not grant ownership. The reason nobody is buying and selling digital images is because producing an exact copy of a digital image costs nothing, which means it's irrational to pay for a copy of an image since you can make a copy yourself for free.
If you buy just an NFT and send the US registered artwork itself along with it to the buyer, that's copyright infringement, and the original artist could sue you for thousands of dollars.
Are there any surveys or something on how much gamers care about NFTs in their games? Because if there's no such data I can't think of a single reason for publishers to care about this.
The implementations get me a bit angry.
They enable criminals to extort and launder funds.
They've led to massive profits for speculators at the expense of ignorant people throwing their own money into the bubble.
They haven't benefited the average person at all.
Bitcoin wastes monumentous amounts of energy, raising the price for everyone else and further polluting the earth; it has wild value fluctuations, making it completely unusable as a currency; and it has no underlying value.
Then NFTs aren't even really ownership. You're buying the right to record a ownership of a hash. It just makes people feel like they own something unique. If you actually want to buy a digital assets without an intermediary, you contact the creator of a work and have him e-sign a contract giving you the copyrights in it. Boom. No need for a intermediary like OpenSea to skim its 2.5% off the top like NFTs do in practice, and you actually gets real rights in the work. People just don't do that because they don't want to actually give up something of actual value, they just want to rip people off, and because it's boring. NFTs are just a fad.
I suspect there will be more opportunities for NFTs to change my mind in the future with governance, but that risks them stepping into SEC governed territory.
What you seem to disagree with is peer to peer applications? You can trust the creation of a game but don't have to rely on centralization to play. Conflating the two is a dishonest take.
There are different concerns that would drive someone to make a decentralized game over a blockchain one. That different concern is what I see you failing to really grasp.
The game in the article is a single-player FPS where the developer mints limited runs of certain items and sells them as NFTs. There's no advantage to the players of any scarcity there even.
Even with blockchain, you still need a centralized source to generate items. You couldn't trust clients to generate items themselves. (BTW, hosting a server is not that expensive, and if you're selling items, you should easily be able to pay for the maintenance with that profit. Asking me to waste my electricity to make up for the developer not wanting to pay for a server is not a very compelling argument.)
And if the game is continually updated or the developer is the only one who can bestow items, you probably have to download updates from the centralized servers anyway to play, either directly or through the blockchain.
If you're looking to play with others you didn't trust over LAN in a place with no Internet, I guess it would have an advantage? But it would only work if neither has gotten an item from anyone else more recently than both were online and there would still be easier ways to accomplish it.
NFTs aren’t any more stupid than the existing game cosmetics/collectibles.
For anyone unfamiliar with the CSGO skins market and the explosion of illegal gambling sites a few years ago, I highly recommend this video [1].
It's just that they control the entire system and can remove the real world value from them at will.
You as the end user just don't own them.
By your definition YouTube videos are worthless, but companies, individuals and Google burn a lot of gas to transport staff and tech, and a lot of electric energy to record videos, convert them into several formats and host them to billions of people.
> [edit] By your definition YouTube videos are worthless, but companies, individuals and Google burn a lot of gas to transport staff and tech, and a lot of electric energy to record videos, convert them into several formats and host them to billions of people.
Literally nowhere close to the amount of energy expended by blockchains, and they achieve far, far more. The mental gymnastics to justify the sheer global scale of the waste continues, I see. Also, this is just straight up whataboutism.
If most blockchains (perhaps excluding Bitcoin) moved to Proof Of Stake and cut their energy expedinture to cumulatively use less than 200000 MWh per year, would you consider using them?
AFAIK, Visa uses up to 205555 MWh per year.
[1](https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-str...)
What Valve has banned is NFTs not using Valve's Tokens. It's not because they're decentralized, because I'm certain that NFT games using some other company's centralized platform would be just as unwelcome.
Is this "moral" of valve? No, I don't think it has any high horse moral standing. I think it's practical because Valve has to work with legal frameworks for virtual goods and they can't guarantee that any other token standards work within those frameworks.
All of this is just to say: Digital goods are stupid. Stupid can be fun - I own dozens of skins for various virtual games that i have bought with real money. I also understand that I "own" nothing and could lose them all at any point. I don't care, because I know they're stupid. Anyone trying to sell them as anything but stupid fun (and most companies are, Including Valve, though I think they're the best of the bunch) should be fined for doing so, and draw the ire of consumers.
I hope people get distracted by the next squirrel that passes by and nft's fade into nothingness.
The whole point of blockchains like Ethereum is to not 'disappear'
But even the ones that are mere API URLs are still far superior to arbitrary, closed-standard in-game proprietary marketplaces that prevent user ownership and exchange of digital assets they've earned.
What if Steam rugpulls your game that you spent 2 years of your life working on? Can't do shit about it. Say what you will about crypto but plausible neutrality of the platform itself is a huge win for content creators and users.
Blockchain games are probably not going to be distributed as PE/ELF bins anyway. They will be wasm delivered via the browser and interact with the web3 wallets.
The closed economy of steam has never liked attempts to take value “offshore”. It’s probably for the best for platform integrity.
And I’m extremely pro-web games!
No walled gardens asking for a 30% cut, direct embedding of games inside a developers site, and for players they don't have to install anything locally. This is what my startup is building with our browser-games platform.
Link to our website:https://www.theimmersiveweb.com/
Source, I have over 150,000 market transactions.
Its "content filter" functionality could/should be separate from other functionalities they offer.
Glad steam's cards are on the table now rather than later :)
Just imagine VRChat with unique collectibles, immutalized on a blockchain like Ethereum (so the item and the owner is completely verified), and being able to trade them for real money.
It's like when Diablo 3 had a real money auction house. They were early, we still are, but these kind of game features will be the general norm in some years.
So Valve will probably evolve in the future and accept them, when the space looks safer.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-24152225
Football index was a scam, I would argue these "metaverses" are the scams of the future.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The concept of metaverses have existed long before the cryptocurrency/ICO/DAO/DeFi/NFT community co-opted it. Same way they have, unfortunately, co-opted the term "web3" in current vernacular. It won't last though.
It's "Clash of Clans" meets "Bored Ape Yacht Club".
NO THANK YOU! I don't want anything to do with it.
I think Valve is making the right call here.
I'm sorry, but the emperor is really walking around with his buttcheeks flapping in the wind.
Most of the biggest games in the world run on selling skins, the natural evolution of that is going from a position where a game developer says you own that skin because there's a record in their database to a position where you own that skin because you have the NFT and the developer recognises your NFT.
It gives portability to something that already has massive massive demand. I do expect gaming crypto currencies and gaming NFT's to absolutely dwarf everything that came before in the crypto space.
In addition, a lot of game developers are already under scrutiny about gambling-like mechanics in their games (e.g. loot boxes). Turning this stuff into NFTs just makes it easier to cash out, which only makes the comparisons easier.
The only people actually making NFT-based games are small developers using it as a marketing tool, or people using these games as a means to promote their NFT project. No large developer is making any major investments in this space, because it isn't a path to making more money then they're already making.
Big established companies never adopt tech like this until they're forced to adapt.
One big hit, one CSGO, one pubg and there'll be a competitor to steam that the likes of Epic can only dream of.
Epic hinged on being able to bring in tons of costumers to the Epic Games Store using Fortnite (A bigger than big hit), but they have not really managed that.
Just like that, a crypto-friendly games store wouldn't be able to bring in enough costumers, even with a really big hit, to touch even the amount of people the Epic Games Store has gotten (freebies definitely helped them).
In terms of getting people on board, I expect it'll come down to how much content gets pushed out by streamers and youtubers, if a game's hot on twitch people will likely at least try it, especially since I'd expect most crypto games to go f2p.
And for the vast majority of gamers, neither does crypto.
> the people who play it... only really play it
And the same would apply for a crypto friendly games store that had a big hit game.
One thing I wasn't aware of, which I only just learned/realized from seeing worried conversations from a game I follow (that incorporates crypto) is that because of all the negative news about crypto, the general public view crypto quite negatively.
I feel like crypto will need to spend a few years as "boring" before it can truly shine.
For me it is just bad solution looking for a problem.