I don’t have anything long-form to talk about, but there’s been a bunch of smaller things. So let’s talk about those.
Crypto
I’ve been in crypto for a month. I have even made some money — not much, but some. Theoretically, I could take the money I have put in and convert it back to dollars, and after all the fees have been paid, have enough profit that I could buy myself a lunch, someplace cheap.
So I’m pretty much an expert.
And in that time, I have seen several new coin issues come and go. They all do the same thing. There is a new coin! It has had explosive growth — 10,000%! GET IN NOW! Coin subsequently becomes worthless. People take to the forums to complain. Shiba Inu was the one I jumped in on — just for fun. I had earned some cryptobucks in Coinbase for listening to their advertising pitches, and so I put that in SHIBA, and every since, I have been watching it become more and more and more worthless.
People don’t understand. There is this weird belief a lot of people have that if a million people put a dollar into a particular coin, then they can each withdraw a million dollars, but that’s not the case. The truth is that ten people will withdraw a hundred thousand dollars, and the other 999,990 people will be left holding nothing. Crypto is only worth as much as people believe they could convert into dollars (or your currency of choice), but the simple truth is that crypto only works if most of the people never withdraw their money, so that the rich people can take it from them instead. HODL indeed.
Why crypto is stupid for games
I’ve put most of my not-very-much money in Ethereum, because most of the crypto games either use Ethereum, or have minted a currency that is tied to Ethereum. I happened to make my first purchase when the price was relatively low, so most of my profit is tied to that first purchase. The reason I still have any money is because I looked into crypto gaming and got scared away. Literally throwing money away.
My favorite target is Dragonereum, of which I’ve written. It’s been a month and the featured dragons for sale are still for sale. But I know why they can’t be sold, and why Dragonereum is a dead game: the price of an Ethereum coin has gone up 1000% since last year. This game is older than that. Back when the game was launched, playing it might not have cost all that much. But now it would cost a player hundreds of dollars to start playing, and why would they? There is no exit strategy. Any money spent there is GONE.
Any game that tries to get you to spend a crypto currency that is going up in value has the same issue. The game becomes too expensive to play, and the experienced players who hoped their game characters would become valuable are left with an asset too valuable (on paper) for anyone to buy. Also, the price to complete an Ethereum transaction has gone from being mostly or entirely free, to potentially a few hundred dollars. Dragonereum’s solution is for the player to buy their own Ethereum-based currency, also called Dragonereum, and save “gas” fees by staying entirely within the Dragonereum ecosystem.
It’s a trap, however…
It has the Atari stamp of approval
I used to love Atari. I had the VCS 2600. My first computer was the Atari 800. I went to work for the company that wrote the Atari ST operating system. (DRI forever!) And of course I had several Atari STs. I totally bought in. I had an Atari bumper sticker. I played Atari games at the arcade. I entered that stupid SwordQuest contest. I devoured those tutorials on programming the Atari 800 display list. I even ate at Chuck E. Cheese, on purpose.
Atari is integrating blockchain across our business, and we are committed to playing a leading role in the utilization of blockchain in video games and entertainment.
https://www.atari.com/atari-partners/
Wilhelm on Twitter wrote: “On the bright side, Atari jumping on board is generally considered a sign that the trend in question is dying.”
I’ve written about the disaster their own NFT project has become. But Atari still has more disastrous ways of ruining what good will their name still has left: The Atari Token.
Our goal is to have the Atari Token used as widely as possible across the interactive entertainment industry, providing benefits to developers and publishers, as well as players and investors.
https://atarichain.com/
The effort here is to convince game developers to license the Atari Token for their game, instead of minting their own coins, so that Atari gets a piece of the action. Like other game coins, it is backed by Ethereum. Atari has purchased some Ethereum, and has split that up into some number of Atari tokens.
Let’s check in on the Atari token.
It’s not really doing too badly. It’s going between 12-14 cents in US dollars. Atari is using a smart contract to record the transactions on the Ethereum block chain, but it’s keeping the details of those transactions to itself. I couldn’t see any record of any actual amounts in the smart contract, so I guess Atari is keeping the information about who owns what and how many to itself.
Know your exit strategy
I plan to rate future Crypto games by a few criteria. Have I written these out before? Not sure.
- Am I in on day one? First movers have the advantage. If the game has been out a year — heck, a month — I’m going to assume all the big players are just waiting for me to give them money so they can leave with a profit.
- How soon can I sell out? I want my money back before all the other first movers take their cut. If I have to hold on to my digital assets for some period of time, I might lose my chance.
- Is the game heavily advertised? If new players aren’t coming in with cash to buy my stuff, without caring too much about how much it costs, I won’t get a 1000% return. This is the standard crypto scam. Get everyone talking about Bitcoin and then people buy Bitcoin.
- Do I have to do anything in particular to increase the value of my digital asset? I’d rather not. The smart first mover will buy many assets to flip. Actually having to play the game wastes time and money.
I have some lists of forthcoming crypto-based MMOs. What will happen is that first movers for each of these games will buy up all the assets, preferably before the game launches to the public. It launches and those initial assets increase in cryptocoin value a million times — from $0.0000000001 to $0.0001! Players looking for the NEW BITCOIN just keep sending in their money! It gets to $0.01! I sell and retire before the bozos waiting for it to hit $0.02 catch on.
I’m not going to write about crypto again
I’m really sorry I spent the last month learning all about it. I feel dirty and trashy now.
Eventually the Securities & Exchange Commission will step in and take a chunk of those windfall profits and then the fun will be over.
What about “Play to Earn”, though? Is that the real threat to gaming? As you pointed out before, people have been using online video games as a means to make real-world money for at least a quarter of a century but for most of that time games developers actively opposed it, or at least said the right things about doing so and that put most players off doing anything about it.
If the whole concept of playing a game in order to make real-world money is not only allowed or even encouraged but actually baked in to the design so that anyone who doesn’t do it is at a disadvantage in term of in-game progression, that’s going to completely alter the fundemental concept of “gaming”, isn’t it? Blockchain will just be the accountancy system. It’s the conceptual realignment in game design that seems to be happening at high level that we should be worrying about.
Yeah, I’ve written before about how high level EverQuest guilds were making real life money off the games — that’s why we took so much heat when we woke the Sleeper on Stromm. The top three guilds were rotating cash runs and we ruined their fun. NO REGRETS.
I was sick to death of idiots ruining the fun in my games by making the game a job with one purpose: to enrich themselves by ruining the game. The current hotness of having game developers BAKE THIS INTO THEIR PRODUCTS infuriates me.
I’m happy to have a backlog that would take me more years to play through than I’ll probably have left to walk around this mudball of ours. I’m all set to become a ‘retro gamer’ where I play those old games from 2015-2020 where you couldn’t even earn money playing them!
Right there with you. I’ll stick with the games that developers wrote so that people could have fun. Weird, I know. Us old codgers, relics of the old days, have to stick together.
In the crypto world, some people get very rich. Most people lose everything they put in. That’s the only way it can work.
That is actually a really good guide to crypto investing as I see it, which is why I have stayed far away from it. However bitcoin is probably here to stay for a while, since some large investors that can bend regulators to their will have started to get into the game. It would be really great if the whole thing would just go ahead and implode so we can stop running power plants for almost literally no reason, but the more really big investors adopt it the less likely that is to happen.
I own some Bitcoin. I still can’t find any reason why it has value — it costs hundreds of dollars to log a transaction. (I’m letting Coinbase hold mine for me, so I don’t get charged until I try to send it to a private wallet, which I have not yet done). What am I going to buy with Bitcoin that is so expensive that I can eat the several hundred dollars transaction fee, that I couldn’t also buy with cash or credit card for much cheaper?
Everyone knows the answer to that.
At least Ethereum has a smart contract ecosystem built on it, and for now is cheaper to log a transaction. BTC, though — it needs to die.
I had not even considered the idea of pegging the value of items in your game to a crypto currency and how badly that might turn out.
I think the biggest argument against the whole thing from a game dev side is the loss of control over aspects of your game. If NFTs had value, somebody like EA wouldn’t outsource them to some rando blockchain outfit, they would make their own variation, and if they don’t have value, there is no real reason to bother with them.
NFTs make the argument that if something is unique, then it has value. 99% of the unique drops I get in Diablo II have zero value, even to a vendor — but they are unique, and I guess Blizzard could wrap them in an NFT but they would still be trash.