Oinks

A podcast on engineering disasters that is also itself an engineering disaster.

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.

It’s all just buzzword bingo.

We can use the blockchain to track ownership of in game items!

That’s just called a database. Databases on a central account server are several magnitudes more efficient. Using blockchains for this is stupid.

You can transfer game items from one game to another game!

This would be a ton of efforts on part of the devs, and even then it wouldn’t really work in most cases because it turns out different games are different games. And even when it does the player experience of being handed end game items when starting a game is also questionable. Even if blockchains for games catch on, this idea never will.

The entire point of the blockchain is to create a decentralised zero trust database, but even if there are legitimate use cases for such a thing (which I’m not convinced of myself), games aren’t one of them.

The reason the blockchain pops up in games (and everything else) is that cryptocurrencies have an extreme illiquidity problem and the crypto “millionaires/billionaires” need new fools to buy cryptocoins so they can turn their illiquid cryptocoin “fortunes” into actual fortunes. This is why NFTs exist, this is why Axie Infinity (which is just NFTs with a terrible game built around them) exists, and sometimes they also dupe established companies into motioning something in the direction of “the future” (every crypto game project by an actual game studio).