We’ve had plenty of content talking about why Play-To-Earn is a bad idea. Some of those can be found here and here.
But what about the other touted use case for blockchain in games: interoperability?
The basic premise is this:
Instead of a regular micro-transaction that we’re used to, sell the skin to a player as an NFT.
A hypothetical example is Fortnite: you buy a particular sword skin, which is actually just a representation of an NFT we’re all familiar with.
Now imagine if you could use this sword in another game, like Valorant. Right?!
Sounds ridiculous to me.
The challenges with this seem insurmountable with current infrastructure, and the rewards few.
Maybe Fortnite and Valorant can have SOME interoperability because most of their skins are for cosmetic purposes only, but what if you throw in a game like Diablo 3 in there?
Diablo’s weapons are stat-based—do the developers want to go through the headache of incorporating a sword that requires extra development time, and also potentially de-rails from their lore, while also having to consider what stats to slap on it?
This problem could become nasty very quickly. For example:
Have we considered what happens when some game studios decide not to have support for a particular NFT? Will people want to play this game?
Which NFT collections do we deem acceptable for use in games?
How many resources does a studio start allocating for this purpose?
While 1) remains a technological hurdle, 2) is more pressing.
We all bore witness to Ubisoft’s epic failure with Quartz.
For the uninitiated, Ubisoft decided to launch a series of NFTs into their game, Ghost Recon Breakpoint, named Quartz.
This shows the dissent of the gaming community towards NFTs.
And for what? This top-down approach to NFTs is probably never going to work, where an individual company launches an NFT. That defeats the whole purpose of trying to incorporate NFTs into games.
The mistake made? Ubisoft doesn’t provide a standard for how other companies can use these NFTs. To flesh it out a little more:
How do I take the NFT I just purchased and use it in another game?
Is the owner of the other game accounting for how they are going to implement that NFT in their game?
Are both the studios going to consider the price fluctuation based on rarity in-game versus how much it’s trading for on a secondary marketplace?
Are the NFTs purely cosmetic or are they Play to Win?
There are too many variables and not enough answers from the crypto-gaming community.
Is there light at the end of the tunnel?
It’s clear that this top-down approach of NFTs minted by a centralized entity is not going to work.
What about the bottom-up approach?
What if NFTs were created first, and games begin building around these NFTs?
Loot project comes to mind when thinking about this.
In theory, it sounds appealing, but we’re yet to see how it plays out in practice. The same 4 points mentioned above apply as problems here as well, but time will tell if it makes sense or not.
This, however, brings me to an interesting idea that I’ve been pondering: decentralized Intellectual Property (IP). (This has nothing to do with Blockchain, by the way.)
How many of you here have been irritated with your favorite game going downhill? Raises hand.
Pokemon, for me, has been my childhood. And it is somewhat sad to see how the modern version of it looks.
Everybody criticizes it, modders do their best job to fix the game, and yet, the mainline games continue to have the same issues for the last 5 years.
But it’s very hard for a new creature-taming game to beat existing incumbents, solely because Pokemon is such a force, a huge brand at that. Temtem comes close, but will never quite reach the scale of Pokemon.
I wonder what a hard-fork of Pokemon would look like in practice.
People are attached to the lore behind games like Pokemon and World of Warcraft, but the companies behind them seem to have become complacent.
I mean, just look at the modding community for a game like Pokemon, they take some of the older games and make them 10x better on average. The top Pokemon streamers on Twitch are usually the ones playing ROM hacks (modified versions of the game).
It leads me to believe that some flexibility of the IP (regardless of blockchain technology, that’s not the prime focus here) could yield potentially great results.
Let me know what you think!
This was great!