Comment by dvt
4 years ago
Play-to-earn will die a painful death, but the takeaway here (which this article dodges) is that players should own their in-game assets. This is really where blockchain comes into play. Diablo 3 tried to do this, but they were too early and too greedy. If done correctly, owning your digital items is certainly more preferable than not.
Again, this is touched in half a paragraph, but this is the real revolutionary aspect of NFTs. And, paradoxically, it's nothing new: Steam store "items" are basically NFTs. Fortnite skins are basically NFTs. It's just that without a decentralized marketplace, you can't sell them.
> This is really where blockchain comes into play. Diablo 3 tried to do this, but they were too early and too greedy.
Diablo 3's in-game real-money market wasn't based on a blockchain, and was doomed to failure for game design reasons alone.
> And, paradoxically, it's nothing new: Steam store "items" are basically NFTs. Fortnite skins are basically NFTs. It's just that without a decentralized marketplace, you can't sell them.
You can sell Steam in-game items just fine on the community market (https://steamcommunity.com/market/). You just can't cash that out to real money because Valve, quite sensibly, doesn't want to be classified as a money transmitter.
The article “dodges” the notion players should “own” their in-game items to the same extent you underplay the implications. consider what the article emphasises: the contradiction implied in a live game being rebalanced in real time, affecting “owned” assets.
Do you really own it if the item’s form, function, and even in-game existence persists only at the whims of a centralised authority—the game’s administrators?
> Do you really own it if the item’s form, function, and even in-game existence persists only at the whims of a centralised authority—the game’s administrators?
This happens literally all the time with Magic cards, lol.