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The year is 2030. It’s a rainy Saturday afternoon. You’ve just finished mining 30 obsidian ore playing Crypto Crush Saga, a match-3 mobile game.
You open up The Elder Chains Online and feel a rush of excitement. Your buddy from school has spent the last 2 years becoming a Master Blacksmith, and he has agreed to turn 10 obsidian ore into an Obsidian Battlestaff, a HUGE upgrade over the Mithril Mace you’ve been wielding for the last weeks.
It’ll take him an hour or so. In the meantime, you hop into Clash of Guilds, and use the remaining obsidian to upgrade your town hall to the next level. That should keep your village safe for now.
You wish you could fast forward time to tonight. Your Guild has plans to go for a deep run into the wilderness in Old School Rune Chains, and your prospects of a successful run (and great loot) have never been better.
All members have been spending the past 2 weeks grinding for better weapons, and you’ve agreed (through a vote) to use the Guild treasury to buy everyone a new full set of Red Dragonhide Armor.
Tonight’s objective is to kill the level 128 Frost Giant hiding in the Cave of Sorrow. He has a 5% chance of dropping an Immaculate Orb of Brilliance, of which there are currently only 4 in existence.
The Orb can be used as a power source in an upcoming space exploration game, and should give your guild a great advantage in reaching distant galaxies first. A 5% drop rate is low, but you’re feeling optimistic.
In the distance, you hear a faint ‘BloCkChAIn doEsNT bRiNg AnYtHiNg nEW tO gAmES’. You shrug, and join your friends in the Discord voice channel.
Life is good.
#blockchaingaming
You’ll be shocked to learn that this guy is now in the AI space.
Guys looking at the worldbuilding of Sword Art Online and thinking the game design was too grounded and sensible and didn’t involve enough stonk speculation.
Like every part of the ecosystem the NFT dorks imagine is so incoherent and not how games work at all. To make it even possible you’d effectively need a closed ecosystem of what are basically mods running on a generic core game, where this is either a collection of games being produced by one dev (in which case there’s no reason to even have some random third party marketplace and super expensive account inventory storage at all) or an ecosystem of multiple devs buying licenses to the centralized ecosystem so that they can profiteer off producing assets (which would quickly crash the entire ecosystem if they weren’t tightly controlled as to how much of a given thing they can churn out or what qualities it could have to stop them from just cannibalizing each other, so again this is better served by a centralized and tightly controlled database operated by the core dev). In practice that would mean the central dev is the one making absolute bank off of just providing the core framework and serving as the middleman for all of this, with incentives to either just pump and dump the licenses to make as much as they can before the whole thing implodes or to tightly control and squeeze the individual game devs to keep the cash cow going as long as possible. You just can’t do this without a centralized framework at all because there is literally no reason for competing profiteers to ever honor each other’s bullshit and it’s completely infeasible for them to be mechanically able to accept items from other games in the first place.
I realized like a third of the way through that that I was basically just describing Roblox (from what I’ve heard about how it works, at least) where there’s one actual dev that just rentseeks off the contributions of other “devs” (children) in one big unified architecture, although even that isn’t as incoherent and dysfunctional as what crypto losers imagined would become the norm for all games, it’s just a bad game that exploits children.