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Shuji Utsumi, Sega’s co-CEO, comments in a new statement that there is no point in implementing blockchain technology if it doesn’t make games ‘fun’.
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 what’s the purpose of doing so? Like in terms of actual gameplay, what’s it supposed to achieve? Is there a valid reason you’d want to include it?
There’s no reason, and there never, ever, ever will be. Ever.
There’s a temptation for a lot of people to shrug their shoulders and admit to themselves that it’s a complicated topic outside of their reach, but it’s honestly not. Like any technology, there’s two sides to it: the implementation and the execution. The implementation is admittedly quite complicated and even honestly a little cool if you’re a techie, but the execution is very simple. We know it’s an append only database with a fully public history. That’s 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 it’ll be used to introduce artificial scarcity and value which most people who just want to have fun playing games aren’t 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 can’t be done with the data stored in the blockchain, you can’t change the rules of the game, they’re hard coded. So why bother having it publicly available on the blockchain at all? Sorry, not sure if I’m making my points clear enough, but does that follow? There’s 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, don’t bother. I’ll argue any worthwhile points you might try to make, but I’ve heard most of the arguments before and they just don’t even bear responding to so ya know …
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 “whelp nothing we can do” to customers losing their items to scams or accidents, and didn’t add any smart contract taxation or other shenanigans, it could work.
It wouldn’t 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.
Yarp. And if that doesn’t get your hackles up, I don’t know what else more to say.
Unless the game was some decentralized open source game, but I’m having a hard time imagining a game like that also needing blockchain tech, outside of maybe having a record of games played for speedrunning purposes, but that’s extremely niche.
What do you think about arguments for using it in cross-game “metaverse” type trading? It’s another buzzword but it would make centralization of the data hard to impossible.
My intuition is we’re 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?
There’s 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 wouldn’t matter anyway.
Could you detail what negatives come with blockchains in games? I’d like to better understand your perspective and position. I don’t know of any games that use blockchains and aren’t some kind of scam, but then again it’s not a hammer’s fault if it’s used to bludgeon someone to death. If a hypothetical good dev somehow put a blockchain in, what negatives are there due to that specific inclusion which aren’t the result of malicious intent?
The negatives are similar to ordering a hamburger inside a restaurant, and having it be delivered via a car down at the nearest bus stop.
It’s just a lot of waste and hassle for everyone involved.
It’s still an entirely implausible scenario. There’s too many hypotheticals here to even properly argue this as “cross-game metaverse trading” 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 there’s 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 it’s 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, it’s 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.
It’s all just buzzword bingo.
That’s just called a database. Databases on a central account server are several magnitudes more efficient. Using blockchains for this is stupid.
This would be a ton of efforts on part of the devs, and even then it wouldn’t 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 I’m not convinced of myself), games aren’t 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 “millionaires/billionaires” need new fools to buy cryptocoins so they can turn their illiquid cryptocoin “fortunes” 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 “the future” (every crypto game project by an actual game studio).
NFTs: Block chain based money laundering.
But I guess BCBML didn’t sound as good.
That’s 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 didn’t 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 it’s not really mine. Blockchain will eliminate that. Game companies mint tokens to represent digital “assets” that they say you “own” but in reality it’s 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 “own”).
I’m 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 it’s 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. We’re getting to a point where the real value in software is in designing ways to stop people from using it unless they’ve 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 they’re 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 “eat” (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 can’t 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 he’s the “owner” of the monkey picture when ownership doesn’t really confer any rights, privileges or abilities that everyone else didn’t already get for free.
I’m not sure I agree with your mortgage insurance example.
The problem isn’t record keeping, but answering the question “if you use an asset as collateral for a loan to purchase that asset, what happens to the loan if the purchase is invalidated”?
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 isn’t digital, so ownership can’t 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 can’t change that, only change the underlying way we store the data.
And the solution to that problem is good record keeping. Blockchain can improve the record keeping by making it public and verifiable.
Again, it’s not a record keeping problem, it’s a problem with people being able to dispute the records, and transactions being able to be nullified.
The records are public today, and you can go check them. It’s usually even accessible via the Internet.
Part of buying a house is the mortgage company checking all those records, and other ways things can go sideways.
Issues usually aren’t because someone misread the records, but because a record was created that was invalid, or things you can’t record on the block chain, like “back taxes” or “grandma had two wills”.
The block chain doesn’t add anything that a public website doesn’t provide more simply, and it’s just as susceptible to the courts coming in and saying that a transaction was invalid because the estate executed the wrong will, or something like that.
Your two examples of the causes, “back taxes” and “grandma has two wills” would be solved still in the case of Blockchain. I’m no die hard fan of crypto currency. However if taxes were verifiable on chain, wills were verifiable and unique globally, then there would be no second will.
Say what you will about Blockchain being one big slow database, it is still one big slow database of huge magnitude, that enforces global uniqueness. Again I’m not entirely sold on the premise but look at how our taxes are done, social security numbers, identities. All these problems stem from a lack of a decentralized authority. If some random credit agency says bill down the street is me, we have no concrete and secure means of verifying uniqueness.
Personally, i have been saying for years that identity should be tied to asymmetric encryption. Definitely do not need Blockchain exclusively to solve these problems, but it’s better than what we have now.
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 “people with guns” - 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 “a database” can’t do?
There’s a great video about the inherent problems with crypto stuff and contract law here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6aeL83z_9Y
Mostly about the inherent legal unenforcability of contracts on the blockchain.
that’s fair, but it’s a question of external authority. the idea behind blockchain is that there are contracts digitally built into the token that won’t allow the transfer unless the conditions are met.
blockchain provides a publicly verifiable transaction history. of course enforcing exclusivity eventually boils down to giving some group a monopoly on violence, but the difference between using blockchain and a database in tracking who has the right to use that monopoly on violence to enforce their exclusivity is whether there’s a verifiable public record of all transactions or just the current state of the data. It allows for the dispute of falsified records, and the automatic verification that all terms of the transfer between owners were met. It doesn’t allow someone to sneak behind the scenes and do a quick “DELETE FROM home_owners WHERE owner_name=‘jrandomhacker’” and then go “Sorry, we don’t have a record of your transaction 🤷🤷”. You could make the logs of the database public, of course, but then the question just expands from “who has access to the database?” to “who has access to the database and logs?”
I wonder what kind of games have Blockchain technology in them?
I am sure I never encountered one, but I guess I am not the target audience.
Yeah I’ve been wondering the same thing too, like what’s the point? I’ve 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 you’re playing a game that’s hosted by a centralized server, then just use a database. I don’t see any benefit for a decentralized blockchain when you’re playing on a centralized server.
There isn’t a use case. They created a product and keep trying to shoehorn it into any industry they can.
The use case is being a buzzword they can use to scam cryptobros and the gullible.
Maybe as an anti-cheat measure for P2P games?
Which type of cheat?
Like item duplication or flat out editing. I’m just trying to imagine anything useful about blockchain in gaming and I that’s all I can come up with.
Ah, I see.
The part about a blockchain that would prevent this cheating are incidental: Its remote nature and unique item IDs, which are abilities it shares with a regular database on the game server.
Exactly. To replace the game server in a peer to peer game where the host cannot be trusted, for example. You replace the central authority with a distributed authority. In theory. It seems to me a central game server would be easier, but I’d course the game stops working when the server shuts down. Blockchain would presumably allow the game to keep working as long as there is a player base to function as an authority. But this seems a contrived idea. I can’t imagine it would be better than a server in practice.
The only justification I’ve ever been able to think of is Pokémon. The idea is supposed to be that every Pokémon is unique but there’s actually only a limited set of variables to define each individual ‘mon. 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 Pokémon was truly unique and on the blockchain, it could be meaningful in ways they currently aren’t. There could be only one Coalossal that Wolfe Glick won the Player’s Cup with. He could trade it away for charity and someone would pay for it. I could trade Pokémon away and track them as they’re traded around the world.
It’d be cool. But it would not meaningfully make the game more fun. And it’s Nintendo so they’re 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, “there are many pidgeottos but this one is yours”.
A blockchain idea has to not only be a good idea, but also not possible with simpler technology for it to be genuinely worthwhile.
This isn’t even necessary to do. You can already do this with systems in place. There’s no good use of nfts/blockchain except if your goal is to scam people.
I’ve got to give you credit, this is the first time I’m hearing of a situation where blockchain actually serves a purpose in a game. It’s 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 that’s why, even though using blockchain to enforce uniqueness on Pokemon is a genuine use case that I can see the potential value of, there’s elements of it I’d hate if they were implemented. I’ve 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 it’d 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 “catch 'em all” because an event-only Pokemon was only available at an event 300 miles away?
Simple rule of thumb; any time someone says blockchain in a sentence, replace it with “big slow database”. Now you can think about it clearly.
Thanks, that’s helpful! I’ve had a lot of really good responses from everyone about various use cases for blockchains in games, but “big slow database” does seem to sum up most of them remarkably well!
Ofcourse it’s a over-simplification since it’s actually an “append-only geo-distributed database with non-centralized control” 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 can’t solve that a blockchain can and they stumble a few steps.
The most successful example for a blockchain game is “Axie Infinity” which is something of a Pokémon-like. It used blockchain technology to track the unique “Axies” (= Pokémons) which could be traded and sold. So the blockchain was used to do just that.
The big promise of games like “Axie Infinity” was “play-to-earn”, games which allowed players to earn money through playing the game, such as trading in “Axie Infinity”.
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 “Axie Infinity” 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 “play-to-earn” 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.
Capitalism wins again!
It’s only purpose is to monetize your gameplay time with some kind of real world “value”.
Everything else is just the lies they tell you to get away with enshitifying the game.
You’re 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 don’t legitimise this in the way blockchain games do, there’s no technological reason they couldn’t, only legislative ones.
The only thing the “blockchain” 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.
It’s 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, it’s 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 it’s 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.
This was in fact the original purpose of cryptocurrency. The seminal Bitcoin white paper is titled “Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system”.
I really hate how far we have come from this dream. Decentralized peer to peer electronic cash is something we desperately need, as financial institutions have way too much control.
So far it seems to be to make money off gold grinding in the Philippines if Axie Infinity is any indication.
There are a few ways to do it. As one mentioned, trading of in-game assets. Additionally, some games want to become “Play to Earn”. 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. It’s 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 I’ve 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. It’s an economy system implementation and most people don’t 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
It’s not really a ponzi scheme when it comes to cryptocoin because they just keep minting more. They are literally printing money. So they don’t need a source of money. This isn’t me advocating for such games at all though. They are usually trash. I can see a world where something like WoW’s gold system is tied to a cryptocoin and thus the money you earn in WoW gains more direct real-world value. Of course, it’s something like 0.00001 of a US dollar but it’s something.
They aren’t saying crypto is a ponzi scheme, they’re saying play to earn is a ponzi scheme. Saying pay to earn isn’t a ponzi scheme because more money is minted is like saying a ponzi scheme isn’t a ponzi scheme because the fed prints more money. Ponzi schemes are a business model where the majority of revenue comes from sign-up fees and investments, the economy they exist within is irrelevant.
That being said a lot of cryptobros seem to want to use crypto as a ponzi scheme so it’s easy to see where people get that impression. Pump and dump can be framed as one - the initial investment is people buying the crypto or dedicating resources to mining it giving the illusion of increasing value, then the people with the most crypto (top of the pyramid) “dump”, causing the model to collapse and extracting surplus value from people’s investment. This isn’t inherent to crypto more than any financial system though, it’s a side effect of the economy being small enough that individual actors can cause a total market collapse and people treating it as an investment rather than a currency (possibly promoted by crypto being deflationary?)
Most of the supposed benefits of blockchain in gaming would either never actually be realized due to the infeasibility, or would be just as easily implemented using alternative, pre-existing methods.
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 Pokémon does, except that you don’t have to worry about the cards deteriorating as you use them.
Once you realize that Magic and Pokémon 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 they’re the same card. I could maybe see Pokemon using NFTs because they’re supposed to be your special semi-sentient animal friend, so making them non-fungible is a natural progression. They’ve 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 they’ve seen, battle partners they’ve had, etc etc etc) which affects its behavior in subtle ways that simple numbers can’t 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 doesn’t require the pokemon cost anything. If I were to implement it, I’d probably avoid calling it “NFT” like the plague because it’d pull in cryptobros like a swarm of locusts and ruin the fun for normal people who don’t want to pay $3000 for a Zigzagoon.
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 won’t 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 wouldn’t even realize it was being used. However, it’s harder to get funding based on buzzwords that way.
This is a very good point - it isn’t (and can’t be) a feature, it will only ever be an implementation detail unless you’re selling snake oil.