Have any MMOs actually put their economies on the blockchain yet though? I know people have been talking about this for years, but I haven't heard anyone talking about it actually happening yet.
Why would anyone do that? I don't see neither a gameplay advantage for doing that, nor a technological one. Is there any applications that could take advantage of that which I am missing?
Without items being registered on the blockchain, there is no way to know how rare or common something actually is, so there is no way to accurately price it. So everything from weapons and armor to gold, ore, reagents, crafting supplies, furniture, housing, etc. Without items being registered on a blockchain, sure you can have gamers throwing down $20 bucks here and there, but you're never going to have university endowments and state pension funds allocating some of their investments into virtual items.
> Without items being registered on a blockchain, sure you can have gamers throwing down $20 bucks here and there, but you're never going to have university endowments and state pension funds allocating some of their investments into virtual items.
It's at this point I'm assuming you're being bitter and trolling.
How is a pension fund investing in WoW diamonds any different than a pension fund investing in a diamond mine in real life? The only difference is that in real life there is a predetermined (albeit not entirely knowable) difficulty function, whereas in WoW the company that makes the game can just decide to mint however many they want overnight. But if you can use technology to preclude the latter from happening, the suddenly there is zero difference.
Sure a better game could come out and the value of items could come down, but that isn't really any different than if people in real life decided they just liked garnets instead of diamonds or whatever. And presumably as Moore's Law slows down, winning games will stay in the front runner position for longer.
From a pension fund's perspective, you're basically just finding something that a small number of people love passionately and then hoping that as more people learn about that thing, the value of everything connected to the ecosystem increases. That doesn't really seem any different than investing in a social network like Facebook or whatever, which clearly pension funds already do (usually by allocating a small portion of their funds into VC, although sometimes directly).
"How is a pension fund investing in WoW diamonds any different than a pension fund investing in a diamond mine in real life?"
Volatility.
Since I can see it coming, the fact that real-world assets have a non-zero volatility does not mean that the level of volatility in virtual assets isn't a difference in quality and not merely quantity.
What happens to your WoW diamond's investments when the next Wow expansion brings out UltraDiamonds and the latest shiny hot BiggerNumbersThanLastTime weapons and armor can only be bought with those? Again, the fact that this occasionally happens in the real world still has nothing with the routine nature of this sort of thing in the virtual.
Only an idiot would invest in Wow diamonds. Put your money into buying stock in the company running WoW instead.
> What happens to your WoW diamond's investments when the next Wow expansion brings out UltraDiamonds and the latest shiny hot BiggerNumbersThanLastTime weapons and armor can only be bought with those?
Well that's the beauty of the blockchain. You just have a contract in place saying that weapons and armor can only get X% more powerful each year, so that way there is a fixed amount of inflation.
Even if what you said is real the game itself wouldn't actually run on the blockchain as a smart contract.
Cryptokitties is a testament to how pathetic the blockchain is as a platform for complicated games. The fact that possessing a hash representing the genome of a cat is enough to qualify as a game is laughable. I've played lots of highly simplified games that involved breeding animals and optimizing for specific traits and what cryptokitties offered was just one mechanic in an entire system consisting of dozens of interacting mechanics and MMOs like WOW go way beyond a dozen mechanics.
> Cryptokitties is a testament to how pathetic the blockchain is as a platform for complicated games.
I don't think anyone is arguing that DLT, as it currently stands, is a complete piece of shit. But that doesn't mean that no progress will be made over the next 30 years. Especially since registering and tracking virtual items is pretty much the perfect use case for DLT.
But that's not how video games work. I get it, you're passionate about blockchain, but you'd make a suuppper boring video game. You need players in order for this economy to exist.
The workforce for WoW is entirely optional, and applying real world economic forces to it would be a great way to kill it. How would these items be generated in game? If it's CPU power, you're describing bitcoin, it's not player interaction, there's no in game mining required, and if there is, now you're wasting someone's time and CPU for something that's going to quickly stop being fun.
You could still tie it to player interaction, so some loose combination of player skill and time spent in game. Don't these games already try really hard to prevent botting?
Is the idea that the company is just doling out items? An artificial scarcity? Doesn't that make the market super untrustworthy if they could flood it at any time? You can't do traditional coin mining as that would remove the effort from the gameplay.
Yeah, I don't really think this is a hot idea but just playing devil's advocate. You could make versions of the same argument for de Beers and diamonds, but I suppose pension funds don't invest in diamonds.
This is very classic solution-in-search-of-a-problem thinking. Its prevalence in the cryptocurrency and blockchain communities is why I'm extremely bearish on both.
> Without items being registered on a blockchain, sure you can have gamers throwing down $20 bucks here and there, but you're never going to have university endowments and state pension funds allocating some of their investments into virtual items.
Why is it a problem that university endowments and state pension funds aren't allocating some of their investments into virtual items? It's not.
> I want to invest money into games, but I can't. Other people want to get paid to play games, but they can't. How exactly is that not a real problem?
You can already invest money into games and/or get paid to play games via a variety of methods. It seems like you're shoehorning the blockchain into the equation unnecessarily.
Besides, solution-in-search-of-a-problem doesn't mean you're failing to target real problems. It means you came up with your solution first before analyzing the specific problems you're now trying to apply it to. That's almost always inferior to starting with the problem and then working backwards to craft the perfect bespoke solution.
Almost all of the problems that blockchain obsessives point out are either (a) trivial problems that few people care about, or (b) are better solved without needing a blockchain.
Is it easy to convert the money back into cash? I remember PLEX (and WoW now has a similar token among many others), but I swear it was a one way conversion, though there was monetary value in playing for free.
> Without items being registered on the blockchain, there is no way to know how rare or common something actually is, so there is no way to accurately price it.
What? You price them the same way you price them in the real world: domain knowledge and data.
EVE in particular has charts that tell you historical transaction amounts and volume.
Imagine how many people would want to play an MMO where the loot tables are determined by what return they give to a bunch of boomers who have probably never even heard of the game.
Currently the incentive structure is to make a gaming offering compelling (addicting?) enough to justify a monthly subscription. If you create a two way value transfer for money/virtual items with legitimate institutions you're going to completely fuck the incentive structure. Imagine what happened with the Diablo real money auction house except now the scalpers are pension and hedge fund managers.
> Imagine how many people would want to play an MMO where the loot tables are determined by what return they give to a bunch of boomers who have probably never even heard of the game.
How is that any different than, say, these people looking for diamonds in Crater of Diamonds State Park? I'm linking to this specific guy because he describes it well: "It's a lottery ticket with exercise."
Similarly, Facebook decides what content to show you based on what's profitable for investors. But for whatever problems Facebook has, it's still much more widely used than any competitors run by non-profits or whatever.
