Sega calls video games that use blockchain technology 'boring'

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.

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?

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.

NFTs: Block chain based money laundering.
But I guess BCBML didn't sound as good.

That’s just called a database.

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 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.

There isn't a use case. They created a product and keep trying to shoehorn it into any industry they can.

Maybe as an anti-cheat measure for P2P games?

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?

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!

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.

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.

A decentralized venmo/paypal.

This was in fact the original purpose of cryptocurrency. The seminal Bitcoin white paper is titled "Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system".

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

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.

but some are

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.

Efficiency and performance are valuable, not entertaining. My point is that "boring" is a category error for these things, they aren't game mechanics and they have no entertainment value.

I wouldn't go so far as to say there's no viable use-case, but every example I've seen has been a terrible misappropriation. This is largely because they make the mistake of inclusion of an algorithm to somehow be featureful or entertaining. As I see it, this discussion is a bit like ransomware becoming very prolific and people are saying there are no viable use-cases for encryption because it's been used to scam so many people.

To be clear, literally all NFTs are is a key: value mapping on a blockchain. That has nothing to do with finance, art, games, or anything else associated with them at present - the value of a tool is in how it's used. They've been used extensively by shitty people, so now people only know of the shitty ways to use them.

The article is more correct than what I've been seeing in this thread - their inclusion doesn't make games fun, which is correct. People are essentializing the use-cases of an algorithm, some saying NFTs make a game fun (somehow?) and others pointing out that they're trash cash grabs that seem to actively make the experience worse.

My mistake, I should've read the article. I didn't think OP editorialized the title.

NFT sounds like a convoluted way to earn money for games. If a company can make a exciting, engaging, fun to play game, can't they just sell them? Adding NFTs into the game/gameplay might just annoy players and scare people away.

The big thing that web3(which includes the blockchain) represents to me is big tech's magpie-like tendencies, an attraction to shiny and new things for the sake of them without any thought towards how it will bring value to the customer. Everything new has to be presented as big and inevitable as home computing was in the 80s. The problem though is that even if we give web3 the most generous bearth it is at best an iterative improvement that can only truly improve certain niches. And we've seen this toxic hype cycle with everything whether that be the cloud or VR/AR or even 3D Technology back in the day.