We have seen many iterations of dodgy ways to fund a MMORPG, starting with cash shops, though some would say the pre-order takes that crown. Since then we have seen everything from loot boxes to crowd funding, some which are inherently more dubious than others but all of which have many examples of being used in an abusive manner.
Having linked our gaming to gambling, gaming studios now want to link our gaming to cryptocurrency commence. According to some elements of the gaming media this is "an exciting time", it was the blinkered forward thinking of that phrase that made me start this thread. When will the gaming media wake up to this, likely never as apathy has been their overall attitude towards the changes we have seen over the years. That said, have we as players not also been lazy in kicking back at being treat like cash cows?
Now I know some see potential benefits, such as content creators (real content creators) with the likes of a Minecraft style game being paid by players for their contribution. These changes have always had a plus side though, it is the overall negative that has damaged the way we play. Even here though I would point out players have been happy to supply their creation for free, is making this all about the money you get what we want gaming to be about? Going back to cash shops, a flat fee was replaced with a "buy everything in the game" approach. Now Blockchain games are going to turn us into venal merchants who only care for the coin we gather. Where is the gaming ethos there?
The dangers of blockchain to gaming are mainly an exaggeration of what we have already seen. We have talked on here before of the importance of items being bound to your account and the way "skin economies" can distort what gaming should be about. Now you will eventually be able to use your item from one game to purchase an item in another game and so on. This further commercialisation of gaming will turn players into mini cash-shops, completing the circle that cash shops started when introduced.
Another issue that arises is that Blockchain "players" do not like differences between themselves and other players apart from what they have "earned". That means classes and power lists will go the way of the dodo, bitcoin games will want a banality in character generation never seen before. Apart from power ups and P2P, as long as it can be earned that's OK, here you see the worst aspects of gaming being made a priority. I don't have an issue with cosmetics, but if you do bitcoin welcomes in a new era of cosmetics, as these games only exist for what you can buy and sell.
"Playing" in an enterprise based on cryptocurrency is a whole other issue, I see it as unstable ground, but I realise many do not. But that's an issue we have covered here in a number of threads. I did note that in articles about blockchain games, blockchain casinos were covered, which rather shows you where gaming is now.
Even supporters of these developments have spotted potential issues, such as the community can get very contentious when gaming is about what money you are making. Remember how bad your MMO community can get at times, well a lot more so. Their other questions seem to all be about if there is enough money in this for them, gaming has internalised the mindset of gold sellers into its players, that was sad to see.
In summery: Blockchain is the latest example of bad business practice in gaming, which will just like cash shops adversely change the face of MMOs as we know them.
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https://biturl.top/rU7bY3
Beyond the shadows there's always light
No fate but what we make, so make me a ham sandwich please.
https://biturl.top/rU7bY3
Beyond the shadows there's always light
As such, it is pointless to raise as a factor as this always was, is, and will be.
This particular means of making profit didn't sound like something I'd be interested in, so I'll stick with the tried and true purchase and subscribe model when available, and buy to play when not.
If players feel it must not come to pass, the time is now to build a unified front against it. The only way to void a marketing model is to deprive it of revenue. Failing that it will establish a foothold and flourish from there.
Essentially, it's f2p all over again. If players had banded together against that model it would have been deemed nonviable and abandoned.
So, how set against it are you?
So the only solution long term to this is a legal one, already gambling in gaming is being recognised as detrimental by governments. The addictive effect of blockchain making you think you are making money may be tagged on to that. But that starts now with players talking out against this just like they are about gambling in MMOs.
In many cases, people offering blockchain assets literally place a string into a blockchain, holding a link to their website. So if you were to hold a blockchain of an in-game sword, the game developer would award you the item in-game, this would have an ID, this would sit somewhere on a server (to run the game), it would then also show the ID somewhere on a website, and they would then do this completely arbitrary and superfluous step of putting a link to the website (or the id) into a blockchain. This seems like madness to me - the blockchain minting step has no value beyond novelty.
There are two viable scenarios I can see:
Two major caveats: if the game goes bust, the service provider still holds the IP rights and the copyright over the game assets - not sure how much pure progression data is worth then; blockchains have strict limits to how much they can store as far as I know - if the blockchain doesn't store progression in its entirety and relies on linking to somewhere, this defeats the whole purpose.
This doesn't comment at all on the game design perspective. It would no doubt have a massive impact on how "fun" a game is - which is a whole different beast.
For me, as perhaps you allude to in your final paragraph this is all about gaming ethos, why we play and the effect of mercantile gaming systems on us all but particularly the young.
So I looked it up, thanks for the (re-) enlightenment.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Governments are adept at lip service against things, but their actions don't always reflect their claimed concerns.
Worth trying, I suppose, but I wouldn't put much stock in the success of it.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
My understanding is that the blockchain facilitates trading between games and the cryptocurrency only comes in if you can convert what you have earned in game to real money. Both of which I find counter to gaming ethos. Now you would be perfectly reasonable in saying that I and other posters here have done a lot of speculation on how these games will develop, but I just delved into what gaming journalists have said and that's where they say this is going.
You can utilize it for transactions between players, sure, but you can also use it to house any kind of transactional data, including actual skill use. In many ways you could use it as a database of sorts, and some games are being built nearly completely on a blockchain. The name blockchain is not being misused. Games can be built on a blockchain and never use cryptocurrency at all.
That you're worried about that specific part of a blockchain game is one thing but it isn't indicative of every blockchain game. A blockchain game doesn't inherently need to integrate a cryptocurrency at all to be called a blockchain game.
Hiden costs of blockchain games is a true question IMO.
Massive distrust on my part and probably a lack of understanding.
Until I see some examples of block chain in other uses which benefit me personally (meaning games I'm interested in playing) I'm going to continue to hold on to my accurate, albeit limited view on the subject.
BTW, I work in the banking sector where distributed ledgers are being used in all sorts of new projects at the firm which so far are all related to handling financial transactions such as digital wallets for various cryptocurrencies but not many other uses as far as I can tell.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I know there is this whole Blockchain mining thing going on with Crypto Currency, and, truth be told, the idea of my computer being turned into some mining platform while I am trying to play a game does not appeal to me.
Personally Ive been playing an Arpg called lost relics which uses Ethereum BC items. Gaming is going to take a huge shift once block chain is normalized. It will, but it's still early.
check out https://lostrelics.io
"The Society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools."
Currently: Games Audio Engineer, you didn't hear what I heard, you heard what I wanted you to hear.
I can see it having value in a game where the ownership and transfer of unique assets is a fundamental aspect of the gameplay.
Likewise in competitive environments where the legitimacy of the results of player interactions matter to the participants.
But blockchain advocates often seem to imply that anything could benefit from replacing the old database paradigm with a blockchain, and I'm not following.
Surely the benefits need to justify the resource requirements for validation? In a game where anybody can defeat Illidan and acquire one of a potentially infinite number of Blades of Azzinoth, how many participants in the chain actually care about validating these events, let alone finer interactions such as quest progress and what junk is in people's inventories?
Again, setting aside mmorpgs as crypto-mining, it seems to me that blockchain as a "fad" will result in a greater shift toward games focused around asset ownership and a stratification of gameplay opportunities and player communities around the value of their account. This in turn seems ripe grounds for P2W as a sort of "mine real life to become rich in the game" type of thing.
Are NFT's cryptocurrencies? No. They use a blockchain, and can be bought with cryptocurrency. They are not a crypto currency.
It's funny now that everyone wants to put a caveat that "it has to be uses that benefit me" for a blockchain game to be called a blockchain game.
It doesn't matter that the use of blockchain in games is more than just financial, and even articles on this site have defined uses outside of financial for blockchain, but it requires comprehension of the systems to understand their uses.
Nine chronicles and openera are both doing a lot of features that utilize blockchain that aren't cryptocurrency or specifically finance related.
"As for the game’s link to blockchain, an official FAQ details how players can turn on in-game mining to both contribute their personal processing power to the blockchain while getting some in-game incentives like 10 NCG per block mined. The FAQ does state the amount of NCG gained from mining will lower by half every four years, and promises that only about 25% of processing power — or one core of a quad-core CPU — is used"
https://massivelyop.com/2021/01/28/nine-chronicles-is-a-decentralized-peer-to-peer-blockchain-mmo-with-open-source-modification-features/
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
"When playing OpenEra, obtaining materials and assets will become fully tradeable non-fungible tokens that players can choose to keep, trade, or use later on. In the current version of the game, several mini-games will allow players to participate in tournaments, such as a fishing contest, or a battle royale mode.
These tournaments are what Cardenas considers, “no-loss” tournaments, where money is put into a liquidity pool (think of this like a savings account), and earns interest over the course of the tournament."
But I'm open to seeing differing examples if someone can share them.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon