So at this point, out of sheer passion, a player can create a game customization or custom content for a game. But the idea is that they should get a share of the monetary value those things create? Right, and I don’t think this is a completely flawed belief. Big game publishers benefit in immeasurable ways from the things players do in the game, and in even less concrete ways than creating a mod [modification]. If you play an MMORPG like World of Warcraftthose kinds of games are only really popular because they have culture and community.
One VC [venture capitalist] on Twitter, amid Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision, pointed out that only shareholders saw any return from the buyout, not players creating the real value. His point was that if the games used a decentralized autonomous organization, that would theoretically lead to fairer compensation for players. And again, I don’t disagree with the basic point, but I don’t know that you have to make everything measurable and reimbursable. Especially if it is debatable whether volatile game tokens have fundamental value.
It’s hard for me to imagine a player who has had years of fun playing a game with their friends, helping cultivate a culture, and then expecting money for it. It’s a relatively new space, so there’s literally no good academic research trying to understand what the motivations are, who the users are involved in this space. What do they think? It’s also hard for me to imagine a real person ever thinking that way. I would be very curious to see what a real existing blockchain user thinks.
Well every time a new blockchain game is announced they always say they have pre-sold millions in NFTs [non-fungible tokens] and have so many users, right? So the players are there. Or is it that all those so-called players are just speculative investors? I’m very careful not to just take these kinds of claims when you have one of these companies that says we have a market cap of many millions of dollars for our coin that we just minted two weeks ago. A market cap is a pretty misleading but common measure.
Many of them are speculative investments; it’s essentially whales that come into play, they have a lot of money and buy most of the assets. And then what happens is you have guilds, a kind of financial investment organization. They pool assets, sell or rent them, and split any returns. If you look at some of the really big guilds that have received a lot of money from [venture capital] companies like Andreessen Horowitz, look at Yield Guild Games for example, they are some of the most funded companies in the blockchain space.
Many of the developers [developers] working in space talk about this kind of tension, between making a game that a normal person would enjoy or making a speculative asset for a financial investor. Some focus on making a game fun and fun, and some really lean on [the investment aspect].
NFT game Axie Infinity became a primary source of income for some users in the Philippines.
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Developers who create blockchain games that are marketed by real players rather than investors will often say that the blockchain allows them to do things that are impossible in traditional games. Do you think that’s true? Usually when people talk about blockchain in games, they are talking about the future, about things that could possibly exist someday. And that’s kind of the main point here. They don’t just point to the future, they point to the future and then say that the future is much better than what we have today. You can look at the idea of interoperability between games, which is a very common future for blockchain games. This is something that I think is pretty widely understood, especially by game developers, as something that will just never exist.
Right, given our current understanding of games, it would be impossible for an object you created in Halo to go with you Final Fantasy. But in this imagined future, maybe there are video games that exist almost as a totally different creative medium from what we know today? Decentralized and community owned, as some crypto evangelists would say? Again, the idea of a community-written game, it’s a very common idea, but it’s extremely rare for things like this to exist. They are speculative media. The whole thing is characterized by financial speculation, but more generally the whole project is just almost entirely speculative.
So where do you think it all ends? The largest publishers in the world – EA, Ubisoft, Square Enix – are investing in blockchain. Are games just becoming valuable salt mines? Will it fall apart and we forget? Will it remain a niche? I think anything is possible. With more money than ever going into technology and games, these companies can probably do whatever they want.
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But while I’m very critical of blockchain in games, compared to other uses of blockchain, I think they are very good at highlighting what the technology actually does. Ownership and verification and stuff like that. So in terms of what people will do in space, I think gaming as a use case is about getting more people about blockchain as a concept. It is about selling blockchain as a medium, instead of selling crypto games.
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