web3 is not "pay for every click." value prop is disintermediation and decentralization. like purchasing a game asset, and not having it tied only to your iOS or Steam account.
Steam and Apple stores have policies that merchants are legally liable for, including refund and availability policies.
Who enforces it when the creator no longer honors your token?
Web3 is a pretty good use case for this, and the transaction costs barely add anything if you compare to the cut the platform takes (Apple takes 30%) so the game publisher could easily swallow this extra cost too (which could be tiny)
Further, you're now talking about having a way to bring your level 28 sword of whacking into a completely different game world. And somehow you think this is just a matter of an in-app purchase.
It's a weird fever dream.
Roblox already does this. Your in-game purchases are yours and you can carry them from one game to another.
Platforms outcompete protocols - this is why web2 became centralized.
this is close to what web3 is trying to achieve but with all digital assets like domain names as well.
not familiar with roblox but it sounds close to this, except built on a private centralized ledger instead of public and decentralized. so the assets are attached to roblox as a company.
Think of all the stories of startups that offer a product that locks their users and then go to be acquired/shut down by some other bigger company. If the services and the data live on the blockchain, it's guaranteed by design that the users are in control of their own data (no lock in) and that if the company just drops out of the market, others can continue using the services however they want.
Oh, yeah, maybe someone else will make another game and do the work to support a digital hat you bought from someone else. Maybe it'll happen in a bid to try to scoop up users of a dead game. Or maybe, they'll just make their own digital hats and sell you a new one.
And yes, I am not much of a gamer so these examples might sound super silly today. But 25 years ago the idea of people making a living by collecting and selling items on WoW would also be met with general skepticism, so we never know what the future holds.
FIFA licensing will always be a thing and collecting and selling WoW gear / accounts only worked because other people wanted to play WoW that badly. Both work because they're tied to a platform, not in spite of being tied to a platform.
I guess I don't really know what you're suggesting. As it is, people gotta get a new Madden game every year just to update stats. This isn't because of some kind of technical limitation afaik. EA just wants to sell a new game every year. In fact, I think they might have to buy the data and the right to use it from the league.
So, all types of decision making power were given to FIFA because the clubs thought it would be better to negotiate as a group for broadcast rights or game licensing fees.
The thing is, this type of coordination does not require an all-encompassing central entity anymore. You can see that in Europe already with the top teams from different countries trying to create the "Superleague", completely aside from the FIFA/UEFA-backed leagues.
In Brazil, there has been some years already that the most popular clubs decided to break away from the national association and went on to negotiate broadcasting rights individually. Lo and behold, they are making more money than if they went the "unionized" route.
When people want to play a football game, they don't care about it being FIFA. They care about seeing their favorite clubs and their favorite players. If we have the technology that allows clubs and players to negotiate their image rights directly with game publishers, who needs FIFA?
If you want to say that Activision or Square-Enix come up with a tokenized platform for their own assets, which you can then use in other future games, that's marginally interesting. But Activision isn't going to care one bit about creating tokenized assets that players from Square bought on Square's platform. There's no money there.
Furthermore, players play for assets all the time in order to show off. When you start flooding the market with items so that players have cool stuff from day 1, you create a disincentive for them to push through and acquire these other items.
"Hey Jim, we have a hotfix we need you to work on."
"No time for that, Bob, XYZ Gamecorp just created a pair of shoes on the blockchain, and even though it's only going to net us a nickel, we're going to spend the next week working on getting it into the game."
Might as well just light their studios on fire and try to recoup the insurance money, because it'd ultimately be more profitable.
There is a reason that Valve is not too fond of crypto, and it is not "climate change".
Because, like with third party Counter-Strike knife skin sites, it always devolves into money laundering and illegal gambling.
Only in an ecosystem like cryptocurrency that exists for those purposes does it make sense.
It's like worrying about parking lots in a world where self-driving cars are available on-demand. If you don't believe that self-driving cars are ever going to reach that state, fine. But conditional on accepting a premise (web3 games using the blockchain as the basis of the world logic), you can not try to apply the rules of the old system into the new one.
> technology isn't meant for being used as a storage medium for 'world logic"
Au contraire. Perhaps a better terminology would be "world state", which is exactly the function of blockchains. It's not about the game data. It's just the "save file" for the users. And only about the data that needs to be shared and agreed upon all users.
> the games that try to utilize it in this manner will be both expensive and terrible
Why? There are scaling solutions to handle with this. State channel technology is quite appropriate for this scenario. Or highly specialized roll-ups for the different types of games. The "world state" would be secure in the blockchain, but all the complicated interactions could be done off-chain.
> they have the common sense not to do stupid things that will fail miserably.
Please, go tell that to the execs at Animoca Brands: https://medium.com/star-atlas/animoca-brands-joins-star-atla...
Mind you, I am not saying that this game specifically will be a success. I am also never going to claim that all future games are going to be "on the blockchain". What I am saying is blockchain tech brings disintermediation, and that opens up the possibility of having games not controlled by any single entity.
This is the part I don’t get. Use web3 to build your game, but you own no users. I get the value prop for users (in theory), but what is the value prop for developers?
There used to be a time where people made money by providing actual products and services, not by locking users into a platform and exploiting them.
And especially if you want any kind of global ranking to ensure reasonably fair skill levels for matches, you're going to need a centralized service.
Imagine a game like Valorant without any central server. It'd be a much different game, a lot less user-friendly. And some people would go for that, because it would appeal to their moral sensibilities, and more power to them. But it would get destroyed, market-wise, against actual, centralized, user-friendly Valorant.
That's not theory, that's history. Players demanded games have good server browsers, good official servers, and good match-making, and games that didn't provide that suffered.
I guess "Web3" (it pains me to even use that term) would allow another developer to reverse-engineer an application to digest the data as it exists on the blockchain, but... that seems like a pretty negligible improvement over the status quo with many very significant drawbacks. For starters, a Raspberry Pi has orders of magnitude better performance than the "Ethereum World Computer". To make that concession, I'd hope for a much better benefit.
but it is still locked into the walled garden. if 5% of Twitter users want to escape the platform when a billionaire buys it and reinstates Trump, their only option is to use an entirely new protocol (Mastodon).
if 5% of OpenSea users want to escape the platform, they can and already are doing so because OpenSea never owned the tokens and media on its platform to begin with. see: LooksRare, Zora, Rarible.
Maybe too much snark, but there’s a real tension there. “Store it on the blockchain” means “store a copy on every single node, forever”. It’s understandable that incurs some costs, and that one has to store only the most essential information. Maybe, there are some paths forward, like sharded chains?
- global view of the state that is taken as truth by all participants (consensus)
- where anyone is allowed to make operations to change the state (permissionless)
- and all operations that change the state are agreed by all participants (trustless)
You don't need the blockchain to store your music collection. Any content-addressable filesystem can do that for you. But you do need a blockchain if you want to make a decentralized "top-40" list.
What categories of data do you see that (a) average users care about and (b) would want to control beyond the life of a service provider but (c) doesn't depend on the availability of assets/contents/etc. cannot be viably stored on-chain?
[1]: Sure, FileCoin and dependent services offer some control and guarantees over off-chain data I guess.
Again, it's not about the data. Data is cheap. It's the meta-data and what you can do with it that is interesting. It's about the new classes of applications that might come up when the underlying data is not stored by any middleman.
To illustrate: the "Pirate Bay catalog" is many times larger than anything offered by any of the streaming services, but the majority of people still prefer to pay for the services. Github is the destination of almost every open source project, and companies are paying a good amount of money not for the storage of data, but for what it can be done with it.
Without the Google, Facebook, and Twitters of the world pouring substantial resources into hosting and powering those platforms a decentralized approach needs to cover costs somehow.
Of course they monetize the users and their content and make a pretty penny while doing so (except for Twitter).
The centralization of these big tech companies also brings efficiency, optimization, and economies of scale to this infrastructure that decentralized blockchains inherently don’t have. There’s also the issue of much of the Web3 infrastructure being hosted on $BIGCLOUD because lots of data and usage at scale is really hard. Piñata just uses S3 and charges a hefty markup on top of it (as one example). S3 is $0.03/GB at the lowest usage. Piñata is always $0.15.
I’m not saying the decentralized promise of Web3 is impossible. It’s just a bigger question of the vast majority of users who have already demonstrated they’re fine with being monetized by the big tech companies as long as their use is free/extremely low cost paying at least 5X of the fundamental underlying costs. That’s not even getting to content creators that have utilizes these free platforms to already generate significant income for themselves.
The HN crowd has a much better understanding and resistance to big tech and what they do to offer free products that monetize the user. The vast majority of the billions of users on these platforms have demonstrated that they do not care.
almost all NFT platforms will extract some % commission from trades as a form of monetization. they could take 0% but then will have to cover their costs some other way; maybe monthly subscription or regular advertising.
but in the end it doesn't matter how the platform decides to offset its costs, if the data and assets are removed from centralized control. good example of this is NFT art marketplaces - one can go offline, and users can just move to another, or build a new one on the public data (blockchain tokens + IPFS media).
1. you purchase digital items with centralized payment processors like VISA
2. the asset is transferred to your centralized iOS/Steam account. you do not "own" it, the company owns it. if you are banned from Steam, you lose all your games and game purchases.
web3 is asking how these two things can be changed to remove the intermediary.
the best frame for this is not "web3 ideals are not worth pursuing" but "how can we make web3 ideals feasibly work"
similar thing happens in rest of digital art and media worlds. photographers, musicians, and artists all doing NFTs, then later Instagram, Spotify, Adobe, major art auction houses all begin to explore NFTs as they can then capture some of that market.
The indies could do this without crypto. They'd need a standard, Drop-box, and to collaborate on a little messaging system so their payment DBs can update one another. Pow! Same functionality, equivalent level collaboration, no crypto-bro middlemen, 1000th the environmental burden.
PoS removes the environmental burden.