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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.
The only games that have achieved something like this do it through the proxy of a unique currency. So if something goes wrong they have a simple number to tweak in order to resolve it.
A simple example here might be WoW allowing you to grind for gold which can be used to purchase battle.net currency, which can be used to buy skins in Overwatch. The currency trade rate between gold and battle.net currency makes balancing easier on them. The idea of a direct “this item works in more than one game” is extremely out there and would require a centralising hubworld like VR in my opinion if it were ever going to work. Different games within the VR could choose whether or not to implement the hubworld items. Essentially the VR world is a platform for the games in that case. Basically relies on each game dev choosing to do the implementation themselves.
The thing is that Blizzard is an old, established company that has a bunch of IPs people actually like. Nevermind that they are also a sex pest factory for this argument, though of course it needs to always be pointed out.
No one would do this with myriad items. No one wants to worry about how much WoW Thorium I need to mine to be able to get the card I want in Hearthstone. Making it one central currency is the only way it can ever make sense and even then, only because Blizzard has agreed with itself what the currency should be used for, how much it should buy and so on. There is no way in hell that it would ever work with competing companies. Even in the example how does it work?
Game A has the ore. You mine it there, spending play time and costing them server cycles. So you would have to pay to move the ore over to your global wallet or something, because there is zero incentive to allow this transaction otherwise.
Meanwhile Game B probably also has a way to mine ore in it, because it is some sort of MMO and farming resources is a good way to have your players spend time and effort in the game so they are tied to it more and keep paying for your subscription. They have zero incentive to allow the ore in from game A, because it will just negatively impact their games economy. So you would need to pay them to import the ore, negating the entire point of this stupid, stupid post in the first place.
Replace ore with game currency here if you like, it changes nothing about the argument. If I can get the currency faster in game A then B, game B is incentivised to speed up the money gain on their end to attract players, or to demand a fee to allow the currency to be used in their game since it wasn’t earned in their game and thus is a net loss for them if it is used in it. It has zero advantages to anyone over just having their own currencies or ores.
And even if these games are both from the same developer or publisher and the publisher doesn’t care if the players are in game A or B: Why would players ever want to play both of these games? What is the point? I wanna play my MMO, but I need ore so I gotta play the mining game? it just doesn’t work on any level. If it’s much easier to get ore in Game A then B, then I could see some players doing this, sure, but the developer is hurting their own game by doing so, making less people play it and making players jump through hoops to get what they want. That’s a very good way to lose these players.
This is why I suggest it works better on platforms. Take Roblox for example, where Roblox itself is a massive thing and then games within Roblox are individually created by different developers. Or in my original example, VRChat, where VRChat is the overworld and then individual games within VRChat are created by different developers.
In that case, the items themselves can be created by VRChat, and then developers decide whether to integrate them.
Your platform owner has to be the one creating the items, and developers may be incentivised to integrate them on the basis of it providing value of some sort through the platform integration. Over time and with more and more items though you’re just creating an overwhelming burden upon developers where there will eventually be too many items for them to integrate.
okay. How is it not immediately a race to the bottom then? If game A sets item drop rate at 1 an hour, and game B sets it at 10 an hour, you would play B if you just want the item. So everyone would just crank up the drop rate until VRChat steps in and caps it, at which point all the games just drop at the same maximum rate.
This is assuming that anyone actually cares about the items and it’s not just an incidental thing that will fill up your virtual bags so that you eventually need bigger ones.
Which does bring us back to making it just a currency. You can mine in the mining game and sell your mined ores for currency, which you can then spend in game B to do whatever it is that game is about…except why is that a good thing? We are back to what I said before now, with each of these games needing to account for this currency that can easily net them a loss either in players or in money.
The way this actually works is how platforms like VRChat, Roblox and Second Life actually do it: The platform offers a currency you can buy for real money. That currency is good to spend in any of the shops, games and experiences on the platform that choose to charge for their services and the developers using the platform can then cache it out again for real money and profit. This way, the individual developers, model makers etc. avoid having to deal with issuing this virtual currency, but they can still make a living, while the platform has already been paid for any funbucks bought by players, no matter if they ever spend them or not. Making this system less convenient by multiplying the number of currencies makes it useless.
Like, I don’t know how much clearer to say it. Would you rather:
Buy VRCbux and spend them on a cute anime girl skin:
Have a developer in VRC make a game in which you can earn VRCbux through play, but you have to spend money to play their game (because how else is this developer gonna get paid?), only to then go to the shop you actually wanted to buy from and buy?
What good does the indirection do anyone? The game dev now has to deal with incoming money transactions directly, potentially getting credit card scammed or back charged and having to deal with that headache, while the anime girl skin shop can’t sell skins unless someone engages with games that the shop doesn’t care about. Not to mention that the player isn’t playing the game because they love it but to earn the currency as fast as possible and they are probably gone as soon as they got enough for their purchase, since that was their original goal in the first place. Great system.
Because you’re thinking of implementation solely as a drop rate, rather than as a gameplay item that functions completely differently in one game or another.
In one game you might not even implement the ability to drop it. Want players to come from game x to try game y? Implement an item that they all got in game x as a cool weapon in game y. In game x it might just be a currency drop as you point out, but in game y it might be a core item with its own animations and effects.
Whether it’s cool or not is entirely on the developer’s implementation. It could be dogshit and contribute absolutely nothing. Or it could be high-effort implementation and be genuinely fun. You want your players to try out your friend’s game? You make an item for your game only drop in their game. Voila, your players will now go try that other game, cross promo.
There are creative possibilities there. For the most part the issue is that ghouls want to do the worst possible thing with them and which means the lighter implementations will never be seen or even tried before everyone is completely against the idea.
I have already answered this and I did think of it. I invite you to reread my comments.
Answer me this though: Why if you want to get players of game A to try game B would you require these players to first spend X amount of hours grinding something in your old game to be allowed to have an advantage in your new game? Classically, games have just done crossover events where you get these items for free if you own both on your account.
None of this makes sense and I have exhaustively explained why. There is no scenario in which this is a positive addition for ANYONE, neither Dev nor Player not Platform.
Isn’t it obviously up to the developer implementing it? That’s how it would be in the platform format.
You seem to be frustrated, why? I was under the impression this was a conversation but now you’re making it sound like an argument.
I guess because I don’t understand what you don’t get about it. And becuase if you really think this is in any way a desirable thing to have happen, I am unable to parse it and I think our tastes are more fundamentally different then I thought would be possible when it comes to games.
I don’t think I stated anything about my own personal desires. There’s lots of things I like and dislike, I neither play Roblox nor VRChat. To me this was a conversation about where it can work, not a conversation about whether I would personally like it. Those audiences wouldn’t reject or dislike it, I am not one of them.
Everything doesn’t have to be for me. I’m capable of talking about the correct execution of things I don’t personally enjoy in a way that others might.
The conversation about mechanics does not need to be about something being objective. I like Korean loot grinders with open marketplaces like Ragnarok Online, most people do not, I also like random +1 upgrades for gear that can fail and break the gear, most people do not like that, that’s ok though, mechanics that one person likes are not necessarily what another likes.
The foundational cornerstone of everything I’ve said in this conversation has come from a place of if you were to try and implement it in a way that works, rather than in a way that is inherently designed to just be toxic systems to players by ghouls only looking to find more ways to extract money from wallets.